The Reflections of the I. A Study of the Overlap Between Productions of Self-Identity and Self-Reflexive Poetology in Poetry

The study examines the overlap between productions of self-identity and self-reflexive poetology in contemporary Swedish poetry. In the recent decades, modern poetics has increasingly expressed itself self-reflectively, based in the poet’s subjective experiences rather than the general art of poetry. Michael Kallesøe Schmidt's dissertation shows that Danish poetic works of the 21st century increasingly employ conventions of fiction – not least in poetry – as a manner for poetological reflections. This study indicates that a similar tendency can be found in the contemporary Swedish poetry works K (2019) by Katarina Frostenson and PUR (2020) by Erik Lindman Mata. They can also be considered to be productions of self-identity, i.e., poetry that attaches itself to a literary autobiographical discourse, and thus as a part of a genre resolution from the traditional central lyric, since contemporary poetry includes expressions other than the literary ones. The works of poetry are performative; they stage themselves and their identities, using self-reflexive poetological expressions. The expressions appear in the form of meta-poetry, where the poem's origin, conditions and purpose are presented as fiction and can therefore also be referred to as implicit poetics. I therefore want to argue for how the overlap between a literary autobiographical discourse and an implicit self-reflexive poetics constitutes an interplay worth observing as an indication of tendencies in contemporary Swedish poetry, as well as it shows how the staging of the modern literary subject's practice can look like. The works of poetry’s production of identity and its self-reflective poetological practice provides insight into, and constitute examples of, how the poet and the poetic self present their identity today as part of a contemporary current in poetry