Peter Degerman

Associate Professor of Literary Studies

Is it possible to use lyricism to explore and process difficult questions? Peter Degerman claims that it is. He takes a special interest in how poetry could be used to process questions about our relationship to nature. According to him, it is possible to discern several different perspectives.

– In discussions regarding poetry as an active action in society, focus tends to be what poetry is and is not. An aestheticizing perspective where poetry is construed as a challenge to the thinking process in itself, says Degerman. 

Man and the Forest

But what does the forest mean to us as humans? And, in reverse, how do humans affect the forest? Degerman is especially interested in the relationship between man and nature from a point of view specific to northern Sweden. How does the population in northern Sweden relate to the forest as both a human and an economic resource? What can poetry tell us about that relationship?

– On one hand there is that which I might start from, the relationship between languages and woodlands. On the other there is the postcolonial problem, because of the forest being a resource. In the northern parts of the country, in a system of goods and production, we could in some way be said to occupy a subordinate position.

To Think Beyond Man

In his book Tala för det gröna i lövet (Speak on behalf of the green in a leaf), Degerman discusses whether there are any specific opportunities to process climate issues through poetry, and also if there are grounds for speaking of a special ecopoetic way of reading.

– You have an entirely different perspective on time. A way of thinking outside man as the centre, to see that all of us are parts of the foundation of all life and matter, he says.

Photgrapher: Peter Degerman