Retrogardism and Occulture in Håkan Sandell’s Poetry

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.

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.