When Metaphor Dies: On Johannes Göransson’s “Summer”
Johannes Göransson | Summer | Tarpaulin Sky Press | 2022 | 120 Pages
In Johannes Göransson’s Summer, another word for summer could be toxin, could be wound, could be debt—could be violence, rabble, inflation, angel, döttrar, poetry, translation. To draw the lines of contagion linking each term to the others in their reticulation+circulation, uncartesian grid, would offer something like the topography of Summer. A summer map.
The first of Summer’s four sections begins in the speaker’s kitchen, in summer: “I can’t hear you,” the speaker says. The lilacs are blooming. The radio is on. The rabble is at the door. And—“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.” The pomegranate seeds are for the underworld. The lilacs, like the arils of the fruit, too possess a dimension of horror, hundreds of “bloody little fingerprints.” Summer is sensuous, deathly, even idyllic. Pensive, destructive. Mourning. These contradictions and multiplicities are intensified in Göransson’s summer lyric. Reading Summer it’s hard to not think of and with the term intensity; an intensity that is not voice, and is not a formal effect (of Göransson’s driving use of anaphora, for instance), and is not part even of content because it comes so close to annihilating these other poetic qualities in the text. It is an intensity through which some other face or slope of writing, of the lyric, of the “speaking I,” beams. This intensity has a xenogenetic force.
Near the end of the book’s first section Göransson writes:
I learned to kiss in the underworld
with my mother tongue
and my hymns to inflation
already sung
in a dazzling killer language
I learned to speak
in the most toxic state
with my father tongue
while the war was at war
with a war and a mother
war took place between summer
and my virgin arms
I know the emergency state
of being alive
has little to do with my tongue
it has to do with the lies
I tell my children
with my father tongue
I’m just interviewing them
for roles in lilac antigone
I have a dead child
in summer I have trashed
summer eyes with a million
nightingales because
I’m reading the plays
of Eva Kristina Olsson
Summer is a book-length elegy that serves, in part, to grieve the passing of Göransson’s daughter Arachne—who, as the speaker imparts, was born with a hole in her lungs. “When I picture her,” he says, “she can’t speak / when I listen to her / she speaks ett främmande / språk a mechanical / rhythm it’s her breathing / it’s a protest / poem protest breath.” The mechanical breathing that momentarily sustained Arachne joins poetry as an art of breath and permanently infects it. Summer itself, its short lines, the way it cuts itself off then repeats itself, is a version of this mechanical-natural breathing. The speaker speaks himself into Arachne’s breath.
If there is another disaster elegized in Summer it is that of the “rabble,” a discomfiting term whose identity stays ambiguous in the poem. It clearly indicates, on the one hand, the fascist rallies under Trump; on the other hand, at certain points in the text, it gestures to the transformative potential of the riots against Trump, police killings, the U.S. state and its constitutive anti-Black violence, maybe all states—both disparaged by the same power as actions of the “rabble.” “With all those bullet / holes,” says Göransson’s speaker, “we could make / a rabble strong enough / to kill my debt.”
The hole in a child’s lungs and the rabble at the door—these are two entry points for Summer. The summer circumstance. A personal, medical grief and a political grief that, typical of Summer’s logic, become so contiguous that what comes into view is the field of possibility for both—a lived condition of generalized toxicity, violence, and necropolitics.
The “tiniest hole / inside my tiniest daughter’s tiniest lung” becomes a hole in the world, “världens hål / the garbage hole” through which all garbage of the sun pours into the speaker’s room; the speaker’s daughter herself is “a hole in the middle / of this poem,” and the poem is, in turn, “a hole in the language.” The rabble is “a poem about a nation,” and “I write a motherofpearl poem on my torso // I scrape a hole in a photograph / of my summer torso // I call the poem Daughter // then I call the hole in her lungs The World”—a summer miasma. Summer alchemy. As in a sestina the key terms of Summer serve as end-words that undergo processes of accumulation as well as moments of fulguration as they are announced then retrieved in new configurations—in a metamorphosis that is, however, without measure, end, without the envoi expected at the conclusion of the sestina. No envoi because, in this case, there is no exit from this plane of toxicity that encompasses all poetics, aesthetics, politics, living, no exit at least by means of a movement of transcendence, no way to rise out of the circumstances clean.
Under the pressure of Summer’s generalized toxicity the logic of the sestina becomes one of its many mutant elements. It mutates in scale as it passes through the text’s bloodstream. The sestina becomes a book. And it becomes a way of thinking the world while, at the same time, the sestina-logic itself becomes a different logic. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued for the sestina, ever since the troubadours cultivated its form, as a model for messianic temporality—the sestina as a soteriological device within language that undoes linear, homogeneous time in the poem through its recall of its own end-words until “at the very end, when the movement of cruciform retrogradation [the rotation of end-words in the sestina] is fulfilled and the poem seems condemned to repeat itself.” The envoi comes to recapitulate the end-words in a conclusive, revelatory sequence, “simultaneously exposing their singularity along with their secret connectedness” (from The Time that Remains). Summer’s sestina without envoi is something else then—not messianic. Summer stays in the mixing and the contagion—and extends its duration, holding the poem open even as the poem’s form pushes to a close—without an ultimate clarity in view. If there is solace in Summer it is only ever the minor solace that occasionally sparks up as its elements shift into (then out of) meaningful constellations.
As Summer’s laboratory forms synapses between its dark materials—wound, rabble, debt, seed, revolver, the sun, pills, crime, venom, poem, pöblen, drömmen, “killability”—startling neologisms and phrases flash to briefly bring into perceptibility another way to live—summer forms of life. To make “summer sense” of these flashes is necessarily to respond to the text with one’s own political-aesthetic work in experimenting in new modes of being.
To formulate this in another way—Summer’s lyric and its lyric intensity tend not towards the vertical moments of transcendence that one has come to expect from the lyric and its own version of soteriology (the lyric epiphany, the beautiful, illuminating last line addressed to you) but rather toward the horizontal. In this horizontal framing the thinking of hierarchies is collapsed to become the thinking of multiple contacts; here, new genres of aesthetics and politics and ethics (and the human) become thinkable—responsibility in the received sense, for instance, no longer serves as a meaningful concept insofar as innocence and guilt, art and violence, are not oppositional but rather the compositional facets of a single response-ability.
Later in the poem:
it’s not good the seeds taste acrid
like levothyroxine they are
pomegranate seeds the rabble
tells me what is happening
to my body is skulden
sommaren är min men skulden
är din för du läser denna dikten
I want this poem to be
antimatter but it is more
beautiful undermatter under
ground matter under
the poisoned tree the pills are
lavender and shaped like tears
I am watching lilacs
become matter I’m a child
of film I melt it while singing
a million dollars to pay
my debt I perfect my crime
the pills taste like liquorice
the sun tastes terrible
in the butterfly pavilion I hate
the sun and want to kill it
with kill poems I write love
poems for my daughter my deader
a debtor is what I am
for I need to pay for a new under
world where I can
continue to betray you
Everything that happens in Summer happens in the middle of what Danish poet Inger Christensen called in her own summer book (The Condition of Secrecy, a collection of essays) the “interplay”—the diffractive interplay between self and world, difference and sameness, human and the in- / non- / xeno- of the human, captivity and freedom such that Christensen writes that the very idea of an
individual experience, individual psychology… [is] a fiction, because it suggests that there’s a kind of freedom beyond the purely physical freedom that we own only in our interplay with the world and with each other. For that reason I consider it more important to posit an incorrect explanation of the world than to present an explanation of an individual self that may well be correct.
In this way, the ecopoetic strand of Summer finds its similars in works like Christensen’s alphabet; like the work of Cody-Rose Clevidence, most recently in Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night; like, of course, the necropastoral of Joyelle McSweeney whose double-book Toxicon and Arachne could form, with Summer, an impossible Toxicon and Arachne and Summer.
Outside of contemporary poetry, Summer’s poetics finds its analogues in work currently being done in fields like trans* studies, Black feminism, critical animal studies and plant studies—where what is at stake is also this attempt to dissolve the given world (the white, Western, colonial world) by undoing its framework of thought, its central categories. In part, what all of this work shares is an attempt to make entanglement the starting point of thought; starting with entanglement instead of separateness, starting from the relation, the with, rather than the idea that there are first discrete, separate objects that are only afterwards brought into connection. I think, for instance, of the scholar Mel Chen, whose work spans queer theory and disability theory and animal studies. Chen, in their book Animacies, addresses how, in a condition of environmental pollution and illness, the “constant interabsorption” of both animate and inanimate bodies means that an attempt to grasp this condition of toxicity must “account for the physical nonintegrity of individual bodies and the merging of forms of ‘life’ and ‘non life’ and so must conceive of relationality in a different way.”
I think too of the work that trans* and animal studies scholar Eva Hayward does with her term “transxenoestrogenesis”—in a gesture similar to that of Göransson in Summer, Hayward points out that the act of transwomen using xenoestrogens (such as Premarin, a xenoestrogen because it’s produced by horses unlike the more anthropocentrically marked steroidal estrogens) to refigure their bodies and sensoria in radical ways is not, as commonly believed, a uniquely human act but rather one part of a more generalized state of affairs. Not only have estrogens produced by plants and animals always crossed the boundaries of species and phyla in queer strands of influence but—particularly in the toxic Anthropocene, “Premarin and its many xenoestrogenic kin found in foods, medicines, fertilizers, cosmetics, sanitary products... leak into habitats, environments, and ecosystems... entering into new biochemical conjugations that make their ways into the bodies of others” as pollutants that impact the endocrine systems of animals, resulting in material alterations. (Thus, as deployed through a popular lens of moral outrage and panic, news about frogs, birds, fish undergoing sex changes due to chemical waste.) In entanglement, in its poethics, hope and newness is of the same material and partake in the same circulations as the disaster.
As the book draws to an end, toward the end of its fourth and final section “The World,” Göransson’s speaker declares (in what can be read as a kind of Summer summary):
I invented the perfect crime
in Giovanni’s room
I squandered the allegory
I killed the metaphors
it was a heaven
to listen to the paper
as it burned…
now I’m writing a poem
about skin lets pretend it’s private
the skin let’s pretend I write
a poem for rats
it’s so sad
to think that I am killing
the world as I type this
I press keys
keys to destroying the world
the world wants me to think
I can’t
but I can’t think
I’m typing
I make matter…
I win this time
I whisper
while my bedsheets burn
in Giovanni’s room
Summer’s poetics kills metaphor. Throughout the text, as claimed in the passage quoted, Göransson enacts this disappearance. In Summer language is not figurative—this is an important point. There are no metaphors, no similes. Though the poem is lyrical and though it has its moments of memorability, of sear, there are no images in the sense which this term has taken on in contemporary poetry. The challenge that Summer poses to the reader is to read everything literally—to parse the violence of its lyric as concrete. This violence is not an artistic effect of Göransson’s. It doesn’t shimmer. It is simply the material reality of the world. It’s real violence. And when reenacted by and reshaped through and represented in poetry it is still real. To draw on a distinction formulated by the poet C.D. Wright—Summer as an object is part of the world as it is, not apart from it—thus the violence characteristic of Göransson’s texts.
Metaphor is an element of figurative language but, more generally, it’s also a particular way of parsing the world. Metaphor shows the similarity between disparate materials. It draws what’s different towards sameness as it posits an identity or equivalence between them, it veers towards homogeneity. It veers also toward the abstract—it is in some ideal realm of thought that the metaphor’s tenor and vehicle have their tie.
When metaphor dies—when it is killed—metonymy, its foil, the term it’s been paired with in the history of semiotics, comes to the forefront of language. Metonymy so aptly characterizes Summer because metonymy is a kind of contagion. If metaphor emphasizes the sameness of disparate elements, metonymy emphasizes, instead, the intense differences between contiguous things, how things that share a material nexus are yet wildly heterogeneous. Metonymy reinvents the proximity of touching things; everything is touching, is inter-acting, yet without reduction to singular, featureless slush. In just this way—Summer’s contradictions, tensions. English and Swedish switching into each other suddenly, right next to each other, pressed against each other, but not directly translating into each other. No mediation. Only alternation, flashing, contact. Pop songs and Greek mythology face to face. Sacred love for a daughter. A more profane desire for revenge against the world that made that death possible. “It’s horrifying,” writes Göransson, “to speak” but
I have blood and lilacs
in my sensational swarm
heart it’s summer
and words mean I’m not
alone or jag är ensam
men inte med språket
the language is not
alone it’s swarming