Tag: poetry

A passion for darkness

Issue 4/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Essays

In the fourth part of an occasional series on writers and their inspirations, the essayist and short-story writer Leena Krohn considers the poet Uuno Kailas (1901–1933)

I’m far from claiming that Uuno Kailas has ever been my favourite author. But I definitely had a close affinity to him in an early phase of my life.

There were a lot of his volumes on the shelves in my childhood home. I leafed through them at a very early age – in my sixth, seventh and eighth years. There were times when, as a child, I was very afraid of the dark. I might lie awake at night, stiff with fear, hardly daring to breathe. Presumably that’s why I was drawn to his poem ‘On the edge’:

I’m afraid in my room,
I’m afraid of the window.
And the shadows
of people the window shows
as reptiles – lizards crawling
across my wall.
I’m afraid to look at the door,
it opens on dark.
The doorknob gleams:
it could turn
and they’d be there
the ones I’ve no name for,
the ones I see in my dreams. More…

Sick with emptiness

Issue 3/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

The poetry of Juhani Ahvenjärvi is a poetry of disorientation. Reducing its imagery to a bare minimum, it develops a luminously metaphorical quality through the act of reading.

I do not know Juhani Ahvenjärvi (born 1965), although I have drunk beer with him on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. I do not know what goes on inside his head and why he writes so strangely. In Helsinki and Tampere, audiences burst out laughing in the middle of his poems, but grow serious or confused toward the end. In Paris, the audience listened to Ahvenjärvi’s poems fervently, and it would not have occurred to them to laugh.

At funerals, too, laughter is, aftertears, the most common reaction. More…

In the sand-pit

Issue 3/1997 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Viivoitettu uni (‘A ruled dream’, Tammi, 1996). Introduction by Riina Katajavuori

Driving in the countryside awakens painful memories.
An apple fell into the back seat of our cabriolet
and was eaten. The core was not laid to rest.
It rotted, it vapourised, it disappeared before our very eyes
as we stared at it …. How can driving in the countryside
bring such agony?
How are trees, how are clouds,
how are ladders not
as they are? More…

Word as gospel

Issue 2/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Prophetic tones have entered Gösta Ågren’s work since he won the Finlandia Prize in 1989. In his collection of poetry, Timmermannen (‘The carpenter’, Söderströms, 1996) he brings new life to St Mark’s gospel, that universally known archetypal folk-tale of the West, like the church painters of the Middle Ages.

Ågren nevertheless leapfrogs over his base text, with its overwhelming meaning: not satisfied with illustrating the Bible in a suitable form for modem people, he uses Jesus’s story as a springboard toward universally human questions. He reaches the living quick of the myth. The reader must listen carefully to his lines, for even the Pharisees did not understand the proofs of Christ’s identity. ‘Every miracle is an answer, / and they did not have a question.’ More…

The prisoner and the prophet

Issue 2/1997 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Timmermannen (‘The carpenter’, Söderströms, 1996). Introduction by Jyrki Kiiskinen

The greatest message

Reader, love is
a secret, waiting
for wind, not a choice
between loving or not.
As commandment, degraded
to demand, it will soon be
fanatic like a wound,
a form of hate. How
could a secret
become reality
without dying? Every
decree destroys its region. Made a law
goodness turns
into the protecting
skin, with which the good
touches everything. A demand
for understanding, that,
which we call wisdom,
makes of wisdom
an armour, a cold
father around us.
The real communication is
his life. Against evil stands
the tale of a face.
How could such a secret
become real
or die? More…

From life to life

Issue 2/1997 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Taivas päivystää (‘Sky on duty’, WSOY, 1996). Introduction by Tero Liukkonen

Flitting from dream to dream. Vanishings.
And you can’t even look.
What you looked with has been taken.
Then there’s more you know.
How helpless you are.
Then you know what Bottom meant
awake from his dream and trying to remember
what he’d lost. Then he did wake.
‘Man’s but a patched fool,’ he said,
‘if he’ll offer to say what methought I had.’

                                                                          Everything had gone topsy-turvy
                                                                          but she just went on feeling
                                                                                      she was hanging her head,
                                                                          she just went on feeling she was searching the lawn
                                                                                                   for a four-leaf clover,
                                                                          and the lawn had covered everything up
                                                                          and not a soul was troubling her.  More...

And yet, after decades

Issue 2/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

If Mirkka Rekola had received the recognition she deserved in the 1960s, and not only gradually during the 1980s, the history of Finnish poetry would look different. She is among our central modernists.

Rekola has been trampled underfoot twice by the politics of the literary world. In the 1950s she unknowingly chose the wrong publisher, the conservative Werner Söderström, when the avant garde were on Otava’s list. In 1962, with the increasing politicisation of literature, the cult figure of the younger generation, Pentti Saarikoski, attacked Rekola, considering her an example of the poetry that was to be discarded. More…

Street-corner man

Issue 1/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

In the first part of a series on writers and their inspirations, the poet Ilpo Tiihonen writes about his early hero, the poet Arvo Turtiainen

My first concrete encounter with the poet Arvo Turtiainen, the kind of encounter where the poem comes alive and declares itself to be electricity, sound, flesh, part of the atmosphere, took place at Christmas 1967. The poet’s work Hyvää joulua (‘Merry Christmas’) had just been published. My parents received it as a present from my big sister’s boyfriend, then a strict radical. There is a slight sense of apology about the greeting the giver scrawled in the book: ‘This is not a Christmas Present, not a protest, but an opinion.’ For my parents, low-ranking civil servants who had been through the war and embraced middle-class values, Turtiainen did not really exist, preferably not, at least. With a sotto voce cough the book, unread naturally, was slipped on the dark side of the bookshelf, whence I was welcome to take it as far as possible from the living-room.

More…

I was born here

Issue 1/1997 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems, introduction by Ilpo Tiihonen

Bloggs

You work eight hours a day,
sleep thirteen.
Three hours are gone in eating
and telling dirty stories by your bed.

When they say, ‘If only you’d
read something, mate –
you’re dribbling your life away,’
back you come with:
‘Living like this 1 make everything mine.’

Bloggs, Bloggs,
should the world be changed for you?

                            From Tie pilven alta ('The way out of the cloud', 1939)  More...

Unique moments

Issue 1/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

‘There is no everyday reality. There is not a moment that is not unique, manyfaceted, full of what has happened, of expectations and apprehensions, of hidden connections with the surrounding world, not a moment that is not hard to penetrate and worthy of attention,’ wrote Solveig von Schoultz (1907–1996) in her short autobiographical book Längs vattenbrynet (‘Along the water’s edge’, 1992). More…

Andersson now

Issue 1/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

I have been translating Claes Andersson’s poetry for more than 15 years. In September 1997 Sun & Moon Press brought out What Became Words, my chronological selection of his work, which includes poems from of the 15 books he published from 1962 to 1993. A month or so later, I received En lycklig mänska (‘A happy person’), one of Finland’s nominees for Shoveled snow, played with the children, the Nordic Council Prize. I want to go back to where I started; for it seems that many of my long literary relationships have begun in arbitrary (or fortuitous) ways. More…

I am a happy person

Issue 1/1997 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from En lycklig mänska (‘A happy person’, Söderströms, 1996). Introduction by Rika Lesser

Why shouldn't Johann Sebastian Bach be good enough
      even in this my 59th summer.
I contemplate the apple tree in the middle of the field. 
The continuo branches out just above the earth into four
      trunks, which, in turn, divide
into arms more slender, where the fruits ripen.
The foliage patterns the sky, hands plait the voices
      into a basket.
Under the earth, where the roots rehearse, I wait for
      the succulent, faintly sour fruit.

*  More...

Winged fever

Issue 4/1996 | Archives online, Authors, Essays

After the collective and individual catastrophe of the Second World War, doubts notoriously arose as to whether poetry was possible ‘from this time on’. Theodor W. Adorno declared that writing poetry after Auschwitz was impossible. And Tadeusz Rozewicz said he wrote unpoetry for survivors, for the terrorised, for the dead. Poetry was, for him, ‘borrowed scraps of words, the uninteresting words of the great graveyard’. This is a harsh judgement. More than any earlier written word, post-war poetry was confronted by destruction, hunger and, contrariwise, rampant overconsumption.

Many poets of the Sixties and Seventies resolved these questions by asserting that poetry was in fact an anachronism; anyone continuing to write poetry must forget individual alienation, word-magic and music. Poems should be made by abandoning metre and conveying politically correct truth. In making generalisations about reality – while unable to differentiate it from propaganda – these writers divagated from reality, which is distinguished from utopia by its multiplicity and complexity. Poetic modes as varied as the low mimetic, propaganda poetry, ‘concrete poetry’ and even nature poetry thus managed to become foreign to reality. Themes like participation, progress and liberation frequently led to bigotry, utopian cloud-cuckoolands and blind man’s buff with the self. As Arto Melleri’s allegory puts it, the ‘swankeepers’ vainly ‘fish the shattering waves for reflections’. More…

In the land of the living

Issue 4/1996 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems by Arto Melleri. Introduction by Maris Gothóni

The airship Italia

Farewell, darlings,
General Nobile's sailing in his airship
to a glittering death...
whoever knows the journey's end
as he sets out is there already,
wafted on his wing-stubs;
farewell, doubters smiles on your lips
                                          like the imprints of horse-bits:
'he'll never get there this way'
'get there' – as if 'there' were
some place;
in one day you can only manage a day's journey,
it's more realistic, far more, to get the measure
                                          of Perdition;
farewell, darlings,
I'm off with him, his scrivener, I'm stretching
over the verge of tears towards boundless laughter,
the dignified business of tarring and feathering,
I'm making notes: this is a dream, a single night's
                                         eternity,
a sound mind's storming of the Bastille;
farewell, you who always know better
                                   what should be done than the doers, and how,
you don't do, you know, you put your hat on a shelf
called History, 
General Nobile's flying over the craters of history
northwards, northwards, and the sun's
                                   scoopful of molten tin
is about to splash in the cold ocean,
and the moon's a ball of camphor-soaked cotton wool
wiping the smoking sky,
farewell, darlings, there, flashing ahead,
are the crystal shores of Ultima Thule

From Ilmalaiva Italia (‘Airship Italia’, 1980) More…

Between shadow and sunlight

Issue 4/1996 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Homecoming (translated by David McDuff, published by Carcanet Press, 1993)

It was hopeless trying to keep the window on the yard side clean
Perhaps it was an advantage not to see clearly,
roofs and chimneys, indeed, even the sky became friendly
seen from this renunciation. When it rained
the water formed streets of narrow drops, almost silver-coloured.
I considered them closely.
What use I should have for them I did not know.

*

More…