Johannes Goransson
Johannes Goransson is a Swedish-American poet, translator, and critic whose work occupies a distinctive and provocative position in contemporary American poetry. Born in Sweden and raised partly in the United States, Goransson brings to his writing a perspective shaped by his experience of cultural displacement, his deep engagement with the European avant-garde, and his immersion in the American literary scene. He holds an MFA and a PhD and is an associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches creative writing and literature. He is also a co-editor of Action Books, an independent press dedicated to publishing international and experimental poetry.
Goransson’s poetry collections — including Pilot: Poor (2012), Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2014), Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation, and others — are marked by their immersion in violence, excess, and a deliberately transgressive aesthetic that draws on horror, fashion, and European surrealism. His work is consciously anti-pastoral and anti-confessional, engaging the grotesque and the kitsch as modes of critical engagement with American culture and its violence. He is associated with what has been called the American gurlesque and with a broader tendency in American experimental poetry toward excess and bodily dissolution.
As a translator, Goransson has done essential work in bringing Scandinavian poetry to American readers. His translations of the Swedish poet Aase Berg — including With Deer, Dark Matter, and Hackers — have introduced Berg’s extraordinary gothic, ecological, and feminist surrealism to a wide English-language readership. His translations of other Swedish and international poets have similarly expanded the horizons of American poetry readers and demonstrated the importance of translation as a creative and critical act.
Goransson is also an important essayist and critic whose writing on translation, the avant-garde, and the politics of American poetry has appeared in many venues and shaped ongoing conversations about what experimental poetry can and should do. He is a polarizing figure — his aesthetic commitments are strong and he defends them vigorously — but his influence on a generation of poets drawn to excess, internationalism, and formal experimentation is considerable. He is a genuinely important figure in the American literary landscape.