Johannes Göransson, SUMMER

 

I cant hear you
the lilacs are in bloom and the underworld
is slow I’m slowly listening to girls
sing about the rabble in syrenerna
they’re at my door pöbeln
the girls are in the lilacs syrenerna
I can’t hear them
I have a telephone number
tattooed on my shoulder and the lyrics
of the song on the radio
seems to be they’re at the door pöbeln
they’re at the door drömmen it’s not
a dream summer never ends
the currency has lost the language
inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom
like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar

I’m really enjoying the rhythms and music of poet, editor and translator Johannes Göransson’s latest, SUMMER (Grafton VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022). Swedish born and raised, and living with his family in Notre Dame, Indiana, Göransson is the author of eight poetry titles, although this is only the second I’ve seen [see my review of his Poetry Against All: a diary (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) here]. Between what I’ve seen of these two particular titles, Göransson works a threaded, thinking and continuous lyric, one akin to a journal or diary, allowing the ongoingness and repetitions to shape each larger book-length project. There is something intriguing about a lyric simultaneously held in the present moment, amid text and across a range of memory, moving from a gesture by his partner or one of their children, a thought on writing or film, and a series of recollections from childhood. The collage allows for a particular and tricky balance that appears to be done with ease, and allows for a lovely, continuous lyric flow. “How strange to wake up,” he writes, early on in the collection, “in this language / and be finished / with home be finished / with flowers och ett vackert hals / barnen babbler / like they are alive [.]” The music and rhythms of his lyrics are quite striking, one enhanced through the sprinkling of Swedish words and phrases, edging into the boundaries of his mother tongue. One is reminded of Canadian poets Erín Moure and Oana Avasilichioaei, for example, both of whom weave in other languages into and through their own work, or the work of Canadian expat Nathanaël; all of whom, as well, have done extensive work translating the work of other writers. On the whole, this assemblage and accumulation of poems provide a variety of threads across an internal monologue, one where images are able to fully ebb and flow, fade and form, ebb and flow. If his lyric is water, he writes the whole length of a river. “How can you think / I’m listening / I’m bicycling / which means cyclamen / cyclidium geranium / or the poison I’m marrying / to the summer [.]” He is writing memory, the present moment and family, as well as writing home, as his acknowledgements offer:

I began writing the book while staying in Fredrik Sjöberg’s apartment in Stockholm, looking at a painting of two girls on the wall: Anton Dich’s portrait of Lillian Arosenius and Hanna Gottowt. In my head I also had the title of Mats Söderlund’s first book, Det star en pöbel på min trap (There’s a rabble at my door). Also special thanks to Sten Barnekow for always finding me some place to stay in Lund, where I wrote a lot of these poems.

The poems curl, and loop, curl and loop; returning to repeated moments, repeated images. Curling up and around themselves, moving outward in concentric circles. “in the painting of ruins / I can hear summer,” he writes. Later on: “I can’t hear a thing/ tingling the thing I hear / is my wife doing that silver / thing to summer / until it’s over she is inte här / the summer is not over / here it’s still not over but she does / the end-voices in a landscape / painting with an ugly tree with / two girls from 1923 I can’t hear / her I know she is not here / you are here Lillian and Hanna you / will grow up to be history / I will grow up to be porcelain [.]” A bit further:

[…]
It's OK I’m impersonating a kiss
of lilacs the dust covers
my photographs I only ever write
about childhood
because that was before I died
and now the devil has brought me
back to summer in
Stockholm I’m starting to make
sense of my body
which is becoming buried in
pop music and now ooh-ooh
I have to write you a letter
about my body as if it were
split between foreign
words whispered by angels
and soldiers who march in
through the eye […]

There is such a grief and sense of loss that permeates the entirety of this collection, returning to summer and childhood, returning to children and poison, returning to a foundation of language and a portrait of two teenaged cousins painted a century prior. “To write a poem about violence,” he writes, as part of the second section, “while towers collapse is my scam / a summer scam I do it / while drinking milk of paradise / out of a rifle / but I have to get rid of it / the rifle before the party / starts the party of no / to enter undervärlden / you need a picture of yourself / with a noose [.]” Set in four numbered sections of accumulated, untitled lyrics—“For Lillian and Hanna,” “Flowers for the Riots,” “All the Garbage of the Sun” and “The World”—the first three hold to a structure of standalone poems, most of which each fit on a single page, set as single-stanzas of extended breath running down the page, until the fourth section, which is more fragmented, and extended: a layering of stanzas of one to six lines in a steady stream, all returning back to that poison, that painting, that room, circling into and across a poem about grief (far more grief, I would say, than violence, despite repeated references to an abstract and imprecisely described “violence”). And a counterpoint, perhaps, or sibling work to Joyelle McSweeney’s collection on their same, shared loss, her Toxicon and Arachne (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2020). As Göransson writes in that fourth section:

I invented the meadow
in Giovanni’s room
because my daughter is dead
and I needed it to mean

in Giovanni’s room everything is garbage
nothing has value
and that is why I write a poem
about violence

I write a violence

Given his prior collection, Poetry Against All: a diary, was originally begun while visiting his former childhood home in Sweden in 2013, a book constructed out of entries excised from the manuscript that eventually became his book prior to that, The Sugar Book (Tarpaulin Sky, 2015), one begins to see elements of the larger pattern potentially at work: are these multiple book-length projects begun during the same period of travel home, or are his collections working into what the late Toronto poet bpNichol, or even the late Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch, worked throughout their writing lives, “a poem as long as a life” extended through multiple, published collections? Are all of his published books to-date, or at least these three, part of a single, ongoing project?

Johannes Göransson, Poetry Against All: a diary

 

What is lost in the foreign? The currency of interiority. The communication of interiority. Without communication, language and bodies proliferate, become noisy. Foreigners lead to inflation: too many people, too many versions, not enough soul. Or: Too many images, too many ghosts, pornography. The foreigner traffics in pornography. The foreigner is always looking at life from a distance, but it’s not a safe distance. The foreigner’s distance is perverse. The foreigner is turned on. The foreigner makes the natural strange. The foreigner has secrets, but no humanity. The foreigner takes your photo, makes an image out of you.

I’m enjoying American poet Johannes Göransson's latest, Poetry Against All: a diary (Saxtons River VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), a journal-work composed as a book-length meditation on poetry, art, pornography, ruin, translation, home, tourism and a visit to his former childhood home in Sweden. He blends the immediacy of his extended travel and interactions with lengthy and repeated examinations and musings on the work of artists including Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, David Lynch, Lars Norén, Werner Herzog and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others. “There’s something decadent about riddles. They always threaten to generate excess,” he writes, as part of “DAY 9,” “to fail to anchor the imagery, become unredeemed imagery, become kitsch. How many times have I heard poets pontificate: Poems should not be riddles because they should be ‘accessible.’ Riddles are not poems because they contain secrets. But it’s exactly the sense of a secret that makes them poet, fascinating. I’m intrigued by Laura Palmer, by Francesca Woodman. The riddle that cannot be solved: it leads me into the red room movie theater.” Subtitled “a diary,” Göransson’s entries remain dateless but for days numbered consecutively, beginning with “DAY 1”; one might suggest that temporal precision, in that regard, might be both misnomer and potential distraction, although the sequence of forty-four days does end with a date: October, 2013. Is this, in the end, important at all, or mere distraction? Are we, at the end, offered the chance to count backwards, to see when this book had begun?

While Thomas was mowing his lawn, I went for a walk across the fields. I just kept walking. After a while, I realized where I was walking. When I got there, strangely my first reaction was: What a great house, why would anyone ever sell such a house? I felt like it would be a good investment. Capitalism has infiltrated my nostalgia.

Can there ever be such a thing as “pornography of home”? I mean staring at the place where you’re actually from. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to take away its soul. I can’t return. That’s what made me feel like I was both drowning and too light to walk. Thomas figured out where I had gone and pulled up in his car, took me back through the fields and fields and they surrounded us.

I want to take away all my ties to this place.

Göransson explores his conversational musings in the form of daily diary entries, a journal-esque lyric processional reminiscent of Joshua Beckman’s paired essay-titles The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, 2018); in comparison, Beckman might explore his thinking more in the form of the lyric essay, but both writers manage to explore their thinking as it occurs, and not purely as finished, decided theses. These are books that ease out their discoveries, ones that emerge even through the process of reading. Poetry Again All is a book of declarations, conversation and uncertainty; a book of curiosity; of tensions, shame and vulnerability. He writes a misanthropic isolation that runs throughout, paired with an urgency to connect and comprehend, while still remaining at a safe distance, remaining both observer and observed. As part of ‘DAY 14,” he writes: “Joyelle wrote. Majken is babbling compulsively. The compulsion must be the pleasure of language. Something akin to vandalism. Language scratched the public sphere. The origins of expression is obscenity. My daughter is obscene in her language. Children are obscene. Poetry is obscene. But there are those who want to maintain the illusion that it is good for us.”

As his text repeatedly offers, these entries are supposedly excised from the manuscript that eventually became his previous book, The Sugar Book (Tarpaulin Sky, 2015). Given that Poetry Against All is the first title of Göransson’s I’ve read, so I would be curious to understand just how different that prior title is, and might have been; is this a dark thread that Göransson has pulled from that earlier manuscript, or might this be something other? The suggestion, also, allows the possibility that, although the days might be consecutively numbered, they might not necessarily exist immediately back-to-back. Were these forty-four days composed, instead, across fifty or sixty days? One hundred?

What is this thief’s journal I’m writing? I have to erase these pieces from The Sugar Book. They don’t belong. I don’t want my life to ruin this book. I want to leave that to the inmates. It’s their book. I’m just building the stage so that they can tear it down. Their voices are circulating through my head. More corpses for poetry.

I saw a landscape painting torn by a dull knife. Saw a tree that looked like it consisted of tangled limbs. I was out walking. Stopped by the People’s Park. Thought about the riot. Thought about the paintings of the riot. Saw a horse-slaughter. It was the Paris Commune. The sentence about Crime Flower was its voice over.

Gertrude Stein supposedly said she went to France to be alone with the English language. I went back to Sweden to be contaminated by Swedish.