Abstract
The poetic works of contemporary Swedish poet Håkan Sandell (b. 1962) belong to the current of retrogardism, a poetic style that focuses on premodernist forms and themes. Mining the usefulness of the theoretical construct of occulture, this chapter offers an analysis of several of Sandell’s poems, exploring the shamanic, alchemical, gnostic and magical elements in Sandell’s poetry. A discussion of shamanism shows how the performative aspect of Sandell’s poetry can remind of a form of magical practice. Sandell’s bardic conception of the poet and the importance of music, rhyme and rhythm in (the performance of) poetry reifies the construction of the poet-artist-genius as a special intermediary between different realms or spheres of reality.
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Notes
- 1.
Translations from Swedish prose texts are the author’s. Translations of Sandell’s poems are by Bill Coyle (Sandell , 2016).
- 2.
In its early period, retrogardism opposed consecrated, late modernists like the Swede Tomas Tranströmer and praised the Danes Michael Strunge and Pia Tafdrup for their recovery of tradition. Over the following years, the polemic mounted and came to involve the growing Nordic language poetry movement, culminating in the so-called OEI-debate, in which retrogardists strongly criticized the literary journal OEI and its affiliated poets for their språkmaterialism (‘language materialism’).
- 3.
Reincarnation is not an unusual element in Gnosticism. In some gnostic texts, the person who has not achieved salvation can be cast back to earth and reincarnated as a new human being, who will again attempt to reach gnosis (Filoramo, 1990, 129–130, 137).
- 4.
To my knowledge, this poem has not yet appeared in Swedish and is only available in Coyle’s translation. In addition, Sandell’s latest collection, eloquently entitled Ode till Demiurgen (Ode to the Demiurge, 2013), addresses the duality of spirit and matter in a series of poems, most of which are not translated into English. The interested reader may refer to ‘Sophögen’ (‘The Trash Pile’; Sandell , 2016, 87–89).
- 5.
While in the previous poem silver and gold were mentioned, but only one planet was visible, here the mechanism is specular, with two planets and only one metal mentioned—perhaps in order not to make the alchemical reference too transparent.
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Appendix
Appendix
Håkan Sandell, ‘I do not follow Dante down…’
‘Jag följer inte Dante ner…’, from the collection Gyllene dagar. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2009. Translation by Bill Coyle. First published in Literary Matters (http://www.literarymatters.org/), the newsletter of The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.
Verse
Verse I do not follow Dante down, who’s hung nine days in tree-shade, a shaman, to the gates of the underworld, but stay here in the sun observing idly how the light gold-plates my silver ring, on the table a vermouth. Before a shrouded Santa Maria Novella the plague has caught up with some tardy youths by the empty cathedral where, in the first twelve & a half pages of the Decameron, a little hope is kindled. That was then. An American orates to his mobile phone like the addict on the steps to an invisible friend.
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D’Amico, G. (2018). Retrogardism and Occulture in Håkan Sandell’s Poetry. In: Bauduin, T., Johnsson, H. (eds) The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76499-3_10
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