This article seeks to describe a particular relationship between a contemporary Swedish poet and the literary tradition. Here the works of Eva Ribich are compared to the obsolete descriptive poems of the eighteenth century, as represented by Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna (1750–1818). The comparison seeks to lay bare a similarity, based on how their common theme – the times of day – creates the formal dynamic of the poems themselves. Furthermore, the aspects of Ribich’s poetry that critics have found problematic – their distanced observation of nature and the somewhat static pastoral quality – are illuminated by this comparison. By including reception in the comparison between the poems, one can point to a horizon of expectation that has been in place for a long time and that poses obstacles to a proper understanding of this kind of poetry. These parallels between the poems are interesting not as examples of overt affiliation or creative rewriting but as examples of a collective, anonymous tradition, based on sedimented literary form and widespread patterns of cognition.

The present study examines various devices of ‘self-commentary’ – e.g. the use of footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies – in contemporary Swedish poetry. Historizing self-commentary, and comparing its function with commentary in textual criticism, I argue that a productive tension between labor and aesthetic autonomy is one of its central features. While current poetics often stands opposed to traditional, Kantian notions of aesthetics, self-commentary allows for seemingly outmoded notions of autonomy and genius to be reinstated within a discourse of poetic heteronomy where art is equated with labor. As I conclude, this paradoxical position mirrors and responds to the dual conception of art in the Swedish welfare state. In the ‘welfare regime of art’, the poet is both a craftsman and an artist, the act of writing both comparable and incommensurable to other forms of human activity.

The study examines Poet Voice, a salient oral reading practice in contemporary poetry, based on the three Swedish examples: Ida Börjel, Athena Farrokhzad and Jenny Wrangborg. As a starting point, some of the prosodic measures, concerning the fundamental frequency (pitch), developed by MacArthur, Zellou & Miller (2018) are applied. Complemented by additional measurements and observations, the characteristic traits of Poet Voice in the three poets are analyzed as part of a tradition: a narrow pitch range, an even and regulated use of phrases and pauses are in conflict with conventional prosody, in a way equivalent to the conflict between meter and speech rhythm in traditional, metered verse, and to the conflict between visual lineation and syntax in free, modernist verse. While it is true that Poet Voice suppresses conventional expressiveness, it is argued that, viewed in this way, it also contributes to additional meaning production in a way specific to poetry, by means of iconicity. In addition, Poet Voice means that some traits of the written text can be reproduced in an oral performance.

Ida Börjel’s Ma (2014) demonstrates a fragmented world, shaped by violence, disaster, and economic and social injustice. By assembling these images side by side in a dialectical montage, Börjel avoids a simple representation of the world. Instead, the dialectical montage demonstrates an opportunity for the poet to take a stand against the understanding of the world as systematically organized, presentable, and remote from more profound changes. The montage functions as an archive and a form of knowledge through which the poet can question processes of history writing, of tradition and the present: a poetic technique that both connects to and interrupts the avant-garde tradition of the montage. The poem thus becomes its own form of history writing.