Focus on Finnish Writers

There are perhaps more voices in Finnish lyric poetry today than ever before. At present, at least 60-70 books of Finnish poetry are published annually, and poets are completely free to choose their own styles, forms, and means of expression. 2007 was a particularly diverse year for poetry, offering varied, sometimes opposing conceptions of style to delight and challenge readers. There were many elements interacting in the deep waters of poetry, from powerful sensory images to abstractions, from wordplay to deep emotion, from strict form to anecdotes and avalanches of words, from everyday experience to the spiritual, global, and symbolic. This wouldn’t have been possible in the early days of the ascendancy of serious modernism following the Second World War, sometimes called the era of “lyric Calvinism”.

From Modernism to Flarf, and the Echo of Kalevala Metre

It may be misleading to speak of traditional methods, since various newer and older forms overlap in the stylistic choices that poets are making. One even comes across the resonating rhythms of the ancient Kalevala metre now and then. If modernism was poetry for the eye, poets now dare to write for the ear as well. In addition to general European themes, poets may examine very local, regionally specific subjects. Prose poetry has become an important trend, with many at the cutting edge writing poems divided strictly into stanzas and others spreading words over the entire surface of the page, sometimes even arranging them to form images.

The trends known as language or flarf poetry have brought with them “ready-made” mechanics: poems are composed using material based on internet search engines and discussion forums. With its polymorphism, experimental poetry has revived the spirit of the early 20st century, echoing dada and surrealism. Laughter has once again become respectable.

Modernism may have been perceived as a largely masculine movement, in light of its central practitioners (Paavo Haavikko, Tuomas Anhava, Pentti Saarikoski, Väinö Kirstinä). One of the most acclaimed living lyric poets at present, however, is a woman who was also part of the modernist movement: Mirkka Rekola. Born in 1931, she still writes actively and participates in public discourse. Rekola’s poems and aphorisms, with their vivid parodies, draw on the best traditions of modernism.

The Year of the Woman

The 2007 crop of books offered many strong collections of poetry by women. Rakel Liehu, who recently won the Government Prize for Literature, has come a long way as an experimental lyric poet, and, in her own words, has “come out of the laboratory of language”. The result is Bul Bul (WSOY 2007, see sample translation), a dazzling collection of prose poems which belongs among the highlights of recent Finnish literature. After a decade’s hiatus, Liehu’s twelfth collection relies on the power of story-telling, while also showing a playfulness with language and surprising juxtapositions of imagery. The precise, lyrical language interconnects the fates of Nefertiti, a rat, a crisis shelter, and a monk. The poems use the phonetic properties of language and capture rhythmic fluctuations in tempo.

Helena Sinervo is a uniquely polished presence in the poetic idiom with a strongly rhythmic and even metric style. The prose poems in Sinervo’s newest collection, Täyttä ainetta (‘Absolute substance’, WSOY 2007) are filled with the sounds of Africa and the sea, as well as with eternal and existential questions. In the square shapes of her poems she also inscribes a bit of many other artists’ impressions of Africa. In fact, Villa Karo, a cultural centre in Benin in West Africa where many Finnish writers have worked, has given birth to quite a little boom in books with African themes.

Riina Katajavuori’s Kerttu ja Hannu (‘Gretel and Hansel’, Tammi 2007, see sample translation) makes that most anonymous of little girls in folk-tale, Gretel, something of an adult and active agent. Remembering plays an important role in the text, and light is shed on the witch’s past as well. Saila Susiluoto’s intense poems also show flashes of Grimms’ fairy tales. In the collection Missä leikki loppuu (‘Where playtime ends’, Otava 2007), Susiluoto tells the story of a brother, a sister who marries a king, Erika, and a transsexual named Lola. These melancholy, ponderous poems tell of pain, too – of giving birth and dark winter nights. The book also contains the author’s bird-themed illustrations. In Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen’s Naisen paikka (‘A woman’s place’, WSOY 2007) womanhood is mirrored in foremothers from past generations who provided the provisions that built women’s strong existence today.

In Päivänvalossa (‘In the light of day’, Otava 2007), Sanna Karlström’s second collection, things are seen in brilliant flashes, crystallised in short phrases and statements: “I have shadows under my eyes, / I am five years old. / Evil becomes clear in the darkness, / the crescent moon cuts the hair of someone sleeping. / And that dies which hasn’t yet died. // Why aren’t you sleeping, girl? / Because I am dead. / A horrid girl, with horrid, cold hands.” Karlström’s limpid poetry shows us that the modernism that was pronounced dead is still a vital trend in the 21st century.

Arctic Echoes, Nature and Myth

In Valkoinen kirja (‘The white book’, WSOY 2006), Harri Nordell continues to build his own intimate and  exceptionally concise poetic world. His poems contain echoes from as far back as the stone and ice ages. Fire and water are central elements. “You offered a dish full of roots and the copper line of the horizon. You had a head of birds. You were dead / There was nothing else. Dry stones, a dream crag from which the lake was resurrected. The lake whose name is the name of a shell. // A man walked out of the ashen heath. I didn’t have time. He was far away. Almost on the edge.” Juhani Kellosalo has also strengthened his position as a ruminative lyricist from one collection to the next. In his Syntynyt outoon satuun (‘Born into a strange fairytale’, WSOY 2006), he tells the story of his family, integrating Finnish history, famine and war.

Olli Heikkonen began by writing poems about a fictional Siberia, through which he reflected another Arctic way of life, another Finnishness, in a fascinating way. In his newest book of poems, Jäätikön ääri (‘At the edge of the ice sheet’, Tammi 2007), he is at the edge of sensual nature and myth. The elk and the horse, our national mythic animals, talk with the poet at the border between the city and the wilderness, in a land of wakefulness and dreams.

The Avalanche of the Contemporary World

In his second collection of poems, ?Mitä te odotatte (‘?What are you waiting for ’, Savukeidas 2006), Juha Kulmala blasts a broadside at the wretched, frenzied phenomena of the contemporary world. In long, artfully jumbled stanzas, he critiques the world of possessions and speaks out forcefully on the Iraq war. “when the 5AM traffic jam on the bypass in your head / erupts in a million honking veins / the shores sheets of meat, collapsing brows / thousands of years burst in seconds / subside / in one night / the idea of perfect power sinks / into the depths / the gods / with their families disappear like / vapour / & sulphuric acid fumes fade into the atmosphere’s cough.” Eino Santanen, on the other hand, places familiar objects and experiences in new, surprising arrangements  in his Merihevonen kääntää kylkeään (‘The sea horse turns over’, Teos 2006), composed at the intersection of advertising copy and emotion.

Likewise another young poet, Teemu Manninen, in his second collection, Lohikäärmeen poika (‘The Dragon’s Son’, Tammi 2007), makes use of various internet sources, ennobling rhythmic, profuse and ironic images of the contemporary world taken from the considerable mass of text and media that often overwhelms the individual. “A flood of gadgets in Phuket, dying tourists, / good sausage, this is my generation, / tits and good ass on a video camera wipe away / the story of a dwarf in forced labour.” (The mention of “dying tourists in Phuket” is an interesting coincidence, since Manninen’s poem was written before the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.)

Roles, Romance, and Emotion

Jyrki Pellinen’s Rakkautta Pöytävuorella (‘Love on the Mesa’, Savukeidas 2007) is set in the African landscape, but deals with very intimate themes, particularly the difficult relationship between a man and a woman. Pellinen is one of the legendary lyric Finnish poets with a long career, along with Risto Ahti. Ahti ’s collection Ei kukaan (‘No one’, WSOY 2007) is the author’s 22nd book. The collection once again examines Ahti’s intimate subject matter, such as the varying masks of the artist and what it means to be a man or a woman. “That which is seen most keenly is a mere fissure, you yourself, and out of that very fissure / you creep and cease to be no one.”

Johanna Venho’s work Yhtä juhlaa (‘It’s all a celebration’, WSOY 2006, see sample translation) weaves the everyday, the mythological, and rhyme into a poetry of womanhood and experience. Venho seasons her stanzas with the unique rhythm and sonorousness of rune-songs. She received the Einari Vuorela Poetry Prize for the collection in 2008. Joni Pyysalo’s collection Kuolema, rakkaus ja lisälaitteet (‘Death, love and accessories’, WSOY 2006) are deep down an experience of romance, love, perishability, and folk poetry, although the landscape of the poems is a modern, urban one.

Mikko Myllylahti’s Amerikkalainen yö ja muita runoja (‘American night and other poems’, Savukeidas 2007) also draws from the romance of cities and rainy nights. Myllylahti is a student of film, and it shows in his texts’ relationship to visualisation and their episodic arrangements. The shared mien of the poems is openly emotional – an antidote to the cynical and ironic expression that sometimes seems to harden contemporary lyric poetry. “Autumn has drawn your picture on the map and it is beautiful. // You’ve been dead for three days. The clock has stopped / on top of the piano and rubs its face with its hands. / The cat has jumped from the darkness onto the / sun-pierced rug, like a memory. //”

Katariina Vuorinen & Markku Toivonen

24.9.2008

Translated by Lola Rogers

Katariina Vuorinen has published two collections of poetry. Her second collection Kylmä rintama (‘The cold front’, Savukeidas 2006) uses charged, bristling language to describe childhood, womanhood, violence and love, challenges conventional roles until they break down, and slowly coaxes the reader along. Vuorinen’s poems have been translated into Italian, Arabic, Russian and Spanish.

Markku Toivonen has published four collections of poetry. In his most recent work, Kuka yössä herää (‘Who awakens in the night’, Savukeidas 2006), attention is paid to the dying Socrates as well as to a landmine, forgotten by soldiers and awaiting its fate. His collection of short stories Ihmeitä (‘Miracles’) is set in France in the Middle Ages and the present. Runouden kuntokoulu (‘Poetry’s training club’) is a collection of essays on writing lyric poetry written in collaboration with Risto Ahti. Toivonen has also written plays and radio programs on poetic themes. His poems have been translated into French, English, Lithuanian, and Esperanto.