Swedish Summer

My original plan was to write a poem in Swedish, à la Tomas Tranströmer. Oh what a foolish dream. Near the end of our Swedish class in Uppsala, I realized that my goal of being a svenskpoet (or at least a poet who writes på svenska) was a bit too far-fetched. All I had was a series of imagery and not enough knowledge of the language and its grammar to create anything more than a glorified vocabulary list. I decided I would probably have to write in English.

Honestly? This seemed like a last resort to me. I was reluctant to give up the beautiful Swedish phrases I’d envisioned myself writing. But why? English is my native language, and save a little interaction with French literature, it’s the only language in which I’ve ever read poetry. Certainly there is nothing wrong with the poetic capacity of the English language. But after more than a month of requesting translations and English versions of everything from museum guides to Sacrament Meetings, I couldn’t help but feel that using Swedish would give me a sense of legitimacy that I may have lost somewhere along the way. In spite of my conspicuous “foreignness,” though, I managed to simultaneously feel a sense of “home” that helped me to develop an attachment to this country that I won’t soon forget.

I realized that the conflict between whether to use Swedish or English perfectly underscored the native/foreigner dialectic I’d been experiencing in various ways throughout my stay in Sweden. I wanted to use that tension in the poem, along with three images that touched me (and contributed to that “home” feeling) and seemed to emblemize Sweden—or at least my personal experience therein.

1) When I first arrived, the sun didn’t set until nearly 11pm, and promptly rose again around 2am, leaving a short gap in between for a sky phenomenon I like to call “midnight twilight.”
2) I saw a plaque in the Nordiska Museet about the pacemaker. I took a picture of the quote (“Design that makes your heart beat”) and moved on with my life. Then, my Swedish teacher mentioned that Swedes actually designed the pacemaker and I got to thinking about the possible metaphors associated with that.
3) As I was perusing the bookstore for a Swedish book to take home and practice, I came across a quote by Gary Fisher: “Anyone who rides a bike is a friend of mine.” I thought this was cool since I had noticed that the Swedes seem to be a bike-loving people, much like the beloved Dutch who won me over last summer with their googols of bikes. That alone would have been a great enough connection, but as I was walking out of the mall just moments later, I saw a t-shirt on display in front of The T-Shirt Store with the exact same quote written on the front. Fate had spoken to me, and I knew I would be remiss to neglect the image of bikes in my poem.

How to string these images together became an altogether different story. I didn’t really feel up for the challenge. Not to mention, wasn’t the assignment to participate in a creative project that answered the question, “What is Sweden?” I felt cheap for making this so much about what Sweden is to me rather than what it is… without me. That’s when I realized that Sweden doesn’t exist as a discrete unit outside of anyone’s thoughts or perceptions. While I may be an outsider in some ways, I have spent six weeks on Swedish soil. That qualifies me as an insider of some variety, paltry as my Swedish experience may be in comparison to someone who has lived here for a lifetime. So I stopped being worried about how the poem became more about me than it did about Sweden. I’m not sure there is any other way to do it.

As I worked on writing it—a much more frustrating process than I had anticipated, even in English—I somehow came upon the idea of writing it in different “parts,” that eventually came to mimic the four stages of a butterfly’s life. That would be a structural clue that this is about my development while in Sweden. The writing styles are different for each stage, and I’d like to think that it somewhat matures as it progresses, eventually reaching a somewhat ironic end of writing in child-level Swedish and returning to something of an egg stage. All of it is really “egg” writing, though. It is free verse poetry that reads more like prose at times, and I mostly privileged content over form in order to express my ideas with limited time, talent, and resources—I’m no Tranströmer, after all. You can interpret the poem in a variety of ways, so if you think you know what this all means… please tell me. My psyche will thank you.

Metamorfos

I: Egg, or Newcomer
Hands clasped,

maypole rising,

circle skipping,

heart warmed,

community formed.

First night,

Midnight twilight.

(Does the sun ever sleep here?)

II: Caterpillar, or Museumsmuseumsmuseums

“Design that makes your heart beat,”

the plaque says.

Is IKEA my lifeline? I wonder.

And another regarding textiles:

“The desire to create is eternal.”