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Category: Fellow Poets
✨✍🏾Today’s Poet, Margaret Walker✍🏾✨
Poet and novelist Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, to the Reverend Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker. The family moved to New Orleans when Walker was a young child. A Methodist minister who had been born near Buff Bay, Jamaica, Walker’s father was a scholar who bequeathed to his daughter his love of literature—the classics, the Bible, Benedict de Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, the English classics, and poetry. Similarly, Walker’s musician mother played ragtime and read poetry to her, choosing among such varied authors and works as Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Greenleaf Whittier‘s “Snowbound,” the Bible, and Shakespeare. At age eleven Walker began reading the poetry of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Elvira Ware Dozier, her maternal grandmother, who lived with her family, told Walker stories, including the story of her own mother, a former slave in Georgia. Before she finished college at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the early 1930s, Walker had heard James Weldon Johnson read from God’s Trombones (1927), listened to Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes sing in New Orleans, and, in 1932, heard Hughes read his poetry in a lecture recital at New Orleans University, where her parents then taught. She met Hughes in 1932, and he encouraged her to continue writing poetry. Her first poem was published in Crisis in 1934.
Not even ten years later, Walker’s first collection of poetry, For My People (1942) won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Walker was the first Black woman to ever receive the prestigious award. Her first novel, Jubilee (1966), is regarded as “the first truly historical black American novel,” according to Washington Post contributor Crispin Y. Campbell. It was also the first work by a black writer to speak out for the liberation of the black woman. The cornerstones of a literature that affirms the African folk roots of black American life, these two books have also been called visionary for looking toward a new cultural unity for black Americans that will be built on that foundation.
The title For My People denotes the subject matter of “poems in which the body and spirit of a great group of people are revealed with vigor and undeviating integrity,” wrote Louis Untermeyer in the Yale Review. Here, in long ballads, Walker draws sympathetic portraits of characters such as the New Orleans sorceress Molly Means; Kissie Lee, a tough young woman who dies “with her boots on switching blades”; and Poppa Chicken, an urban drug dealer and pimp. Other ballads give a new dignity to John Henry, killed by a ten-pound hammer, and Stagolee, who kills a white officer but eludes a lynch mob. In an essay for Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Eugenia Collier noted, “Using … the language of the grass-roots people, Walker spins yarns of folk heroes and heroines: those who, faced with the terrible obstacles which haunt Black people’s very existence, not only survive but prevail—with style.” Soon after it appeared, the book of ballads, sonnets, and free verse found a surprisingly large number of readers, requiring publishers to authorize three printings to satisfy popular demand.
“If the test of a great poem is the universality of statement, then ‘For My People‘ is a great poem,” remarked Barksdale. The critic explained in Donald B. Gibson’s Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays that the poem was written when “world-wide pain, sorrow, and affliction were tangibly evident, and few could isolate the Black man’s dilemma from humanity’s dilemma during the depression years or during the war years.” Thus, the power of resilience presented in the poem is a hope Walker holds out not only to black people, but to all people, to “all the Adams and Eves.” As she once remarked, “Writers should not write exclusively for black or white audiences, but most inclusively. After all, it is the business of all writers to write about the human condition, and all humanity must be involved in both the writing and in the reading.”
Jubilee, a historical novel, is the second book on which Walker’s literary reputation rests. It is the story of a slave family during and after the Civil War, and it took her thirty years to write. During these years, she married a disabled veteran, raised four children, taught full time at Jackson State College in Mississippi, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. The lengthy gestation, she believes, partly accounts for the book’s quality. As she told Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, “Living with the book over a long period of time was agonizing. Despite all of that, Jubilee is the product of a mature person,” one whose own difficult pregnancies and economic struggles could lend authenticity to the lives of her characters. “There’s a difference between writing about something and living through it,” she said in the interview; “I did both.”
The story of Jubilee’s main characters Vyry and Randall Ware was an important part of Walker’s life even before she began to write it down. As she explains in How I Wrote “Jubilee,” she first heard about the “slavery time” in bedtime stories told by her maternal grandmother. When old enough to recognize the value of her family history, Walker took initiative, “prodding” her grandmother for more details, and promising to set down on paper the story that had taken shape in her mind. Later on, she completed extensive research on every aspect of the black experience touching the Civil War, from obscure birth records to information on the history of tin cans. “Most of my life I have been involved with writing this story about my great-grandmother, and even if Jubilee were never considered an artistic or commercial success I would still be happy just to have finished it,” she claims. Critical studies of the book have emphasized the importance of its themes and its position as the prototype for novels that present black history from a black perspective. Roger Whitlow claimed in Black American Literature: A Critical History, “It serves especially well as a response to white ‘nostalgia’ fiction about the antebellum and Reconstruction South.”
Soon after Jubilee was published in 1966, Walker was given a fellowship award from Houghton Mifflin. Much of Walker’s responsiveness to the black experience, communicated through the realism of her work, can be attributed to her growing up in a southern home environment that emphasized the rich heritage of black culture. Walker was also part of a vibrant intellectual milieu in Chicago. As a senior at Northwestern in 1934, Walker began a fruitful association with the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She lived on Chicago’s North Side and worked as a volunteer on the WPA recreation project. The project directors assigned her to associate with so-called delinquent girls, mainly shoplifters and prostitutes, in order to determine if Walker’s different background and training might have a positive influence on them. She became so fascinated by an Italian-black neighborhood that she eventually chose it as the setting and title for a novel that she began writing (but never published), Goose Island. On Friday, March 13, 1936, Walker received notice to report to the WPA Writer’s Project in Chicago as a full-time employee. Classified as a junior writer—her salary was eighty-five dollars a month—her work assignment was the Illinois Guide Book. Other writers on the project were Nelson Algren, Jacob Scher, James Phelan, Sam Ross, Katherine Dunham, Willard Motley, Frank Yerby, Fenton Johnson, and Richard Wright. In 1937 the WPA office allowed her to come into the downtown quarters only twice weekly so that she might remain at home working on her novel.
Perhaps her most rewarding interaction with a writer at the project was Walker’s friendship with Wright, a liaison that, while it lasted, proved practical and beneficial to both fledgling writers. Before she joined the project, Walker had met Wright in Chicago in February, 1936, when he had presided at the writer’s section of the first National Negro Congress. Walker had attended solely to meet Hughes again, to show him the poetry she had written since their first meeting four years earlier. Hughes refused to take her only copy of the poems, but he introduced her to Wright and insisted that he include Walker if a writer’s group organized. Wright then introduced her to Arna Bontemps and Sterling A. Brown, also writers with the WPA.
Although Wright left Chicago for New York at the end of May, neither his friendship with Walker nor their literary interdependence ended immediately. Walker provided him, in fact, with important help on Native Son (1940), mailing him—as he requested—newspaper clippings about Robert Nixon, a young black man accused of rape in Chicago, and assisting Wright in locating a vacant lot to use as the Dalton house address when Wright returned to Chicago briefly the next year. Furthermore, Walker was instrumental in acquiring for him a copy of the brief of Nixon’s case from attorney Ulysses S. Keyes, the first black lawyer hired for the case. Together, Wright and Walker visited Cook County jail, where Nixon was incarcerated, and the library, where on her library card they checked out a book on Clarence Darrow and two books on the Loeb-Leopold case, from which, in part, Wright modeled Bigger’s defense when he completed his novel in the spring of 1939.
Walker began teaching in the 1940s. She taught at North Carolina’s Livingstone College in 1941 and West Virginia State College in 1942. In 1943 she married Firnist James Alexander. In that year, too, she began to read her poetry publicly when she was invited by Arthur P. Davis to read “For My People” at Richmond’s Virginia Union University, where he was then teaching. After the birth of the first of her four children in 1944, Walker returned to teach at Livingstone for a year. She also resumed the research on her Civil War novel in the 1940s. She began with a trip to the Schomburg Center in 1942. In 1944 she received a Rosenwald fellowship to further her research. In 1948 Walker was unemployed, living in High Point, North Carolina, and working on the novel. By then she clearly envisioned the development of Jubilee as a folk novel and prepared an outline of incidents and chapter headings, the latter which were supplied by the stories of her grandmother. In 1949 Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and began her long teaching career at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University).
The fictional history of Walker’s great-grandmother, here called Vyry, Jubilee is divided into three sections: the antebellum years in Georgia on John Dutton’s plantation, the Civil War years, and the Reconstruction era. Against a panoramic view of history Walker focuses the plot specifically on Vyry’s life as she grows from a little girl to adulthood. In the first section Vyry, the slave, matures, marries and separates from Randall Ware, attempts to escape from slavery with her two children, and is flogged. The second section emphasizes the destruction of war and the upheaval for slaveowner and slaves, while the last section focuses on Vyry as a displaced former slave, searching for a home.
Walker said her research was done “to undergird the oral tradition,” and Jubilee is primarily known for its realistic depiction of the daily life and folklore of the black slave community. Although there are also quotes from Whittier and the English romantic poets, she emphasizes the importance of the folk structure of her novel by prefacing each of the fifty-eight chapters with proverbial folk sayings or lines excerpted from spirituals. The narrative is laced with verses of songs sung by Vyry, her guardian, or other slaves. A portion from a sermon is included. The rhymes of slave children are also a part of the narrative. A conjuring episode is told involving the overseer Grimes, suggesting how some folk beliefs were used for protection. Vyry provides a catalogue of herbs and discusses their medicinal and culinary purposes.
Walker’s How I Wrote “Jubilee” (1972) a history of the novel’s development from her grandmother’s oral history, is an indirect response to those critics who compared Jubilee with books like Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) and who accused Walker of sustaining the southern myth from the Black perspective. Guy Davenport, for example, commented in National Review that “the novel from end to end is about a place and a people who never existed.” For him Walker had merely recalled all the elements of the southern myth, writing a lot of “tushery that comes out of books, out of Yerby and Margaret Mitchell.” He further found “something deeply ironic in a Negro’s underwriting the made-up South of the romances, agreeing to every convention of the trade.” Walker answered such detractors by citing the references and historical documents she perused over several years in order to gird her oral story with historical fact.
Walker’s volume of poetry Prophets for a New Day was published in 1970. She called Prophets for a New Day her civil rights poems, and only two poems in the volume, “Elegy” and “Ballad of the Hoppy Toad,” are not about the civil rights movement. Walker begins the volume with two poems in which the speakers are young children; one eight-year-old demonstrator eagerly waits to be arrested with her group in the fight for equality, and a second one is already jailed and wants no bail. Her point is that these young girls are just as much prophets for a new day as were Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and John Brown. In “The Ballad of the Free” Walker establishes a biblical allusion and association as an integral part of the fight to end racism: “The serpent is loosed and the hour is come / The last shall be first and the first shall be none / The serpent is loosed and the hour is come.”
The title poem, “Prophets for a New Day,” and the seven poems that follow it invite obvious comparisons between the biblical prophets and the black leaders who denounced racial injustice and prophesied change during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. For example, several prophets are linked to specific southern cities marked by racial turmoil: in “Jeremiah,” the first poem of the series, Jeremiah “is now a man whose names is Benjamin / Brooding over a city called Atlanta / Preaching the doom of a curse upon the land.” Among the poems, other prophets mentioned include “Isaiah,” “Amos,” and “Micah,” a poem subtitled “To the memory of Medgar Evers of Mississippi.”
In For My People Walker urged that activity replace complacency, but in Prophets for a New Day she applauds the new day of freedom for black people, focusing on the events, sites, and people of the struggle. Among the poems that recognize southern cities associated with racial turbulence are “Oxford Is a Legend,” “Birmingham,” “Jackson, Mississippi,” and “Sit-Ins.” Of these, the latter two, claim reviewers, are the most accomplished pieces. “Sit-Ins” is a recognition of “those first bright young to fling their … names across pages / Of new Southern history / With courage and faith, convictions, and intelligence.” Walker went on to publish collections that foregrounded her commitment to Black struggle and liberation: October Journey (1973) and, most telling of her status within the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s, A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974).
Walker’s collected poetry, This Is My Century (1989), and her final volumes of essays, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990) and On Being Female, Black, and Free (1997), cemented her place in American letters. Tomeika Ashford described Walker as “one of the foremost transcribers of African American heritage. Indeed, she enjoyed a long and fruitful career—one that spanned almost an entire century. As a result, she became a historian for a race. Through her work, she ‘[sang] a song for [her] people,’ capturing their symbolic quest for liberation. When asked how she viewed her work, she responded, ‘The body of my work . . . springs from my interest in a historical point of view that is central to the development of black people as we approach the twenty-first century.’”
Walker’s many honors and awards included six honorary degrees, fellowships from the Rosenwald Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was awarded the Living Legacy Award by the Carter administration, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the College Language Association, and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Arts. On October 17, 1998, Margaret Walker was inducted into the African American Literary Hall of Fame.
For My People
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.
Margaret Walker, “For My People” from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker. Reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press.
Source: This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989)
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For Malcolm X
All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.
Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!
Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?
Margaret Walker, “For Malcolm X” from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker. Reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press.
Source: This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989)
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For My People
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama
backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor
and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking
and playhouse and concert and store and hair and
Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn
to know the reasons why and the answers to and the
people who and the places where and the days when, in
memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we
were black and poor and small and different and nobody
cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to
be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and
play and drink their wine and religion and success, to
marry their playmates and bear children and then die
of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time
being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when
burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled
and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures
who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in
the dark of churches and schools and clubs
and societies, associations and councils and committees and
conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and
devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,
preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by
false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way
from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,
trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,
all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a
bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second
generation full of courage issue forth; let a people
loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of
healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing
in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs
be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take control.
Margaret Walker, “For My People” from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker. Reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press.
Source: This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989)
Video/Audio:
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/70635/march-1939
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Sorrow Home
My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me.
Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion.
I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.
I want the cotton fields, tabacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone.
O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own?
Margaret Walker, “Sorrow Home” from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker. Reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press.
Source: This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989)
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Childhood
When I was a child I knew red miners
dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.
I saw them come down red hills to their camps
dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.
Night after night I met them on the roads,
or on the streets in town I caught their glance;
the swing of dinner buckets in their hands,
and grumbling undermining all their words.
I also lived in low cotton country
where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,
or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks
with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by;
where sentiment and hatred still held sway
and only bitter land was washed away.
Margaret Walker, “Childhood” from This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Copyright © 1989 by Margaret Walker. Reprinted by permission of University of Georgia Press.
Source: This is My Century: New and Collected Poems (University of Georgia Press, 1989)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/margaret-walker
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✨✍🏾Today’s Poet – 🇫🇮Finland’s Poets (Compilation)🇫🇮✍🏾✨
http://www.luminarium.org/suomenrunous/index2.html
http://www.luminarium.org/suomenrunous/kalevalacanto.htm
FINNISH POETRY: THEN AND NOW
A Short Anthology Compiled by Leevi Lehto, January 2005
There are many sages, but on the other hand not one
stupid tree.
After writing the most difficult thing
is reading.
Paavo Haavikko 1967, translated by Herbet Lomas
SOME BACKGROUND
Finland: one of the Scandinavian countries, about 5 million inhabitants, capital Helsinki. Two main languages: Finnish and Swedish, spoken by a 6 per cent minotiry. Under Swedish rule up to the Swedish-Russian war in 1808; then an autonomous Russian Grand Dutchy until the country gained independence in 1917, as a byproduct of Russian revolution – and not without a civil war between the rightist “Whites” and a red “People’s Governement”. Two wars against Russia during WWII; after that special relations with the Soviet Union, but retained market economy and parliamentary democracy. Since 1995 a member of European Union, and today best known in the world perhaps for the Nokia phones.
Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugrian family of languages. Complicated, archaic, and rare: related only to Estonian and, remotedly, to Hungarian. At the same time a young language: the written Finnish as we know it has only been there for some 150 years. The development of Finnish literature has always been strongly conditioned by questions of nationality and nationalism. As in the political history of the country, one can distinguish between alternating literary periods with emphasis either on isolation / unity, or crossroads / melting pot.
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About the poems (see also notes on the Authors at the end):
My two hasty translations of the Pre-Modern poetry (especially the Eino Leino poem) are meant as modest experiments in transferring typical Finnish metrics and stress patterns into English. This might become clearer when I read samples of them aloud. Aaro Hellaakoski’s “Dolce far niente” and “Rain” are rare expamples of early experimentation in Finnish poetry.
The Finnish Modernism (unlike the Swedish-Finnish, see Gunnar Björling) is basically a Fifties-Sixties phenomenon. My selection covers the canonical masters, Eeva-Liisa Manner, Tuomas Anhava, Paavo Haavikko, and Pentti Saarikoski, with a slight bias perhaps towards parody, social comment, and questions of poetics and meta-poetics. Kari Aronpuro and Jyrki Pellinen are recognized represantives of a certain second wave Modernism; they have both in their ways radicalized the basic Modernist diction.
For “now”, I give samples from the work of four contemporary poets, quite recent stuff. Note that only Jouni Tossavainen’s pieces are translations. The extract from Hannu Helin’s ctrl alt del integrates many languages, including English – see it as way to get a touch at Finnish, or use it as a basis for translation excercises! Aki Salmela’s and Marko Niemi’s pieces are originally in what looks like English.
Anselm Hollo and Kalevi Lappalainen are two poets of Finnish origins who moved to live in the States.
CONTENTS
PRE: 1905/1927
Eino Leino
Aaro Hellaakoski
MODERN: Fifties-Sixties
Tuomas Anhava
Eeva-Liisa Manner
Paavo Haavikko
Pentti Saarikoski
Väinö Kirstinä
Kari Aronpuro
Jyrki Pellinen
POST: 2004
Jouni Tossavainen: From “Broken Current”
Hannu Helin: From ctrl alt del
Aki Salmela: From Word in Progress
Marko Niemi: Searching for Laura
APPENDIX: TWO AMERICANS
Kalevi Lappalainen
Anselm Hollo
Translators: Martin Allwood, Keith Bosley, Bo Carpelan, Aili and Austin Flint, Hildi Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Leevi Lehto, Herbert Lomas, Ulla Mäkinen, Aki Salmela, Pekka Virtanen PRE: 1905/1927
EINO LEINO
The Harp-Of-the-Wind (1905)
Translated by Leevi Lehto (note that the stress wants to fall on the first syllable!)
The others got heart, I got the harp.
They grieved, had fun, me not, me not.
O wretched me, can’t live, nor part:
my heart throbs not, but tingles, and rings!
O dire fate, the hardest lot:
no peace grants the night, the day no less,
no mercy shows time, nor eternity:
just a jeering and tingling heart-less-ness.
My heart is a harp-of-the-wind, of-the-wind,
its strings are a seat for a ceaseless song,
when in night, and in day, alone, alone,
it sounds to the air, ever-shivering.
Here on earth so cursedly familiar
are the yards of the clouds, the huts of the winds.
No brothers nor sisters I ever can have:
As strange is my self, just tingles and rings!
And the winds of the sky their music they play!
Comes the Spring, then the Fall, after summer so short.
One after one, generations decaese:
just the harp stays back, to tingle, resound.
Lo! the Northern wind! How it storms! How it storms!
Then the Western again, so soothing and warm,
Now the Eastern harsh brings weepings long,
from the tingling, for me, not a fleeting rest.
A window is opened by a virgin cute.
The moon is shining, of gold is her hair.
What is this tingling in night, so mute?
She listens, and listens, her hand to her heart.
She looks back to her lover from time gone by. –
Just the harp-of-the-wind there, nothing more!
No soul does it have, nor sense, oh my!
never weeps it, nor laughs, just tingles and rings!
My country of birth, it will listen too –
wake up one day, and rattle its chains.
Is it time for the freedom, so fair and fine?
No, the harp-of-the wind just tingles and rings.
O bitterest curse, O the cruelest gods:
Being slave, I of freedom keep harping on,
without love, for its praise I sing my song,
being numb, I give rice to the feelings, sense.
AARO HELLAAKOSKI
The Pike’s Song (1927)
Translated by Leevi Lehto
From his hole so wet and drenching
a pike rose up to tree to sing
when through the greyish net of clouds
first gleam of day was seen
and at the lake the lapping waves
woke up with joyous mean
the pike rose to the spruce’s crone
to take a bite at reddish cone
he may have seen or heard, or smelled
or learned by taste of cone
the dew-wet glory, untold yet
of that morning-hour
opening his
mouth so bony
sidewise moving
the jawbone phony
intoned a hymn
so wild-and-heavy
that birds fell silent
immediately
as if overcome by
the waters’ weight
and lonesomeness’
cold embrace.
Dolce far niente (1927)
Translated byKeith Bosley
9 o’clock
evening-lively street
with shining stones
like a colorful tale
your way home under the row of lamps
delightful hurry
when
sonorous rumble
you get back
silly smile
from work
of the mannequins
misted smile
g l e a m i n g s h o p w i n d o w s
t h o u s a n d s o f s t r a n g e rs w a l k i n g
car
paws
claw
the street
eyes fill
with light whirling toward your head
white glove
STOP
white glove on an outstretched hand
hrr-rr-rh
walk safely, weary man
evening eveningway way
windows windows are shining
thoughts are already tasting sleep
sweet sweet weariness
ardent beauty of the evening
dolce far niente
Rain
Translated by Keith Bosley
Behind the table
the white eye of the window
dims
r r r
a a a
i i i sounds SOUNDS
n n n swishes
splashes
in the tight
gulf
on the street
through the roar
the echo of running steps
advances
r r r r r
life a a fades away
i i i i i
n n n n n n
the stony street
sounds sounds sounds MODERN: Fifties-Sixties
TUOMAS ANHAVA
The Stranger
Translated by Bo Carpelan and Martin Allwood
I am a stranger here, I need information
but you speek of the weather,
you write: the trees are blossoming, the wind is resting –
trees are trees, flowers flowers, the wind and rest
takes place from nine at night until six in the morning,
and in spite of the fact that men resemble men and women women,
and woman was made to sweep the home, man the street,
I need a map,
who resembles the other, what follows what,
e.g. mothers resemble each other, children resemble each other,
why do children here follow their mothers:
let the dead bury their death, and bury those who are
living alive
The heads, too, resemble each other, and the bodies,
but here the heads are joined to the body,
I must sort them out
so I won’t lose my way.
EEVA-LIISA MANNER
From Strontium
Translated by Ulla Mäkinen and Martin Allwood
Scuttle
your world. Imagination has already done it.
The Venus wave circles like a betrothed scorpion round the globe
just a sufficiently hot embrace,
and love, death resembling the tail feathers,
will destroy the rest.
The spores are floating through the air,
the cloud grows more intense and returns.
The cup of heaven is already full:
Nine destructions.
Eight terrors.
And the world wanders on
an empty buoy severed from its anchor
deceived, encircled by railroads, exchanged
for dreams whose core was sick,
heavier than lead.
No world
could stand a burden of such dreams.
How could a hand which loved flowers
give the world such a gift?
Empty hospitals Empty corridors Empty flues lost echoes
Empty mussels Who had glued his house
Empty leaves Empty glued-on letters
Empty clocks Time has left its home
The hours have moved off
all twelve soundless women
They have covered the windows of heaven and earth
they are watching in silence The houses would weep
if their cleft eyes
had the power to see:
The wires are hanging down over streets and roads,
the words have floated away like rainwater,
rails stick out, a streetcar
full of posters executed on a pole,
a bull pierced with the innocent side open.
Boston has floated off to the Japanese
where Warsaw and Viborg and Vienna
raise their sunset towers
there where my city
raises its peacock color
the streets are changing their patterns
in the streets there are poems like children
born out of the morning, playing with verbs
On the merry meadows
the blue-skirted children are no longer
romping rose-fingered
the confidants of the flowers
On the streets
no red hoops are playing
joy brings no news
the pigeons do not kiss
The trees do not bend
their fragrant burden
the wind cannot remember
purl my well
the shadows of the lovers
are not united
in the alleys of memory and oblivion
no one remembers
A tank has come to a stop in the field
The trench of the buttercup is growing
On the roof of the bunker fog-enveloped grass grows
like a lace to the emptiness
And turned around by the air pressure the radioactive families
stagger, empty bones,
a swollen corpse is swimming in the canal with its feet toward the sea,
the fighter fish has gotten himself a wife for his helmet
and is celebrating his wedding with glittering sides
On the dock lies an exhausted daily paper
with open wings
the ink fading:
Holland ist in Not
Holland gibt’s nicht mehr
The corpse has reached its goal
The world has shaken off its illness
The Weltall rises, an enormous bat,
terrible, immeasurable wings,
the armies in its creases, a forest of spears,
fame and honor and religious pestilences.
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung
Die Welt als Wolle die Welt als Hölle und als Verstelltheit
A mammal with a wolf’ s face A huge squealer
tasted all the diseases collected all odors
spreading itself out
coming to the molten magma
And the stolen planet, disposed of by a lottery
between the great armies as earlier between the gods
divests itself of its beauty for the sake of a blind person.
The playing, dancing, singing animals,
the brilliant fishes and eager birds
are dying.
Barren waste. It is snowing on the mountains. The reeds do not
remember.
On the other side the stars are turning round.
Counterpoint
Translated by Herbert Lomas
They all fell out of my lap:
the garden, the yard, the house, the voices, the rooms,
the child – a swallow and fish in her hand –
fell to the ground
which bore the stones.
I’m an empty room,
around me the cardinal points
and snow-folded trees:
cold, cold, empty.
But on my hand
rises everything I loved –
the yard, the roses, the flowerpot house,
perfection:
a house like a capsule: quiet seeds
with death and motion in their tissues,
the little well, the little dog, its invisible colla.
The little room, the little windows,
the little, sprightly lace-up shoes
for the heart’s running.
The shoes run from room to room,
from atrium to ventricle,
and the child-fingers build out into the blood
a stone jetty for the rowers of stone.
Dreams like stones
in the deep,
perused, dedicated to death:
And from the windows
waft in tuned birds –
with chucles in their beaks:
drops of Mozart
zart zart
A Logical Stoy
Translated by Leevi Lehto
Mr. H. said to Miss M.:
– A fruit does not exist.
– You are mad, said Miss M.
– Let’s go to a shop so you’ll see.
They went to a big fruit shop, where there were lots of fruits and nothing but fruits; it was the fruit department of a big vegetable market hall.
– May I have a fruit, said Mr. H.
The shopkeepet gave him an apple.
– I don’t want an apple, I want a fruit.
The shopkeepet gave him a big pear.
– I want a fruit, not a pear.
The shopkeeper blushed from annoyance and brought him a watermelon that was big as a baby’s head.
– I don’t want a watermelon, I want a fruit, said Mr. H. monotonously.
The shopkeeper got fretful and piled before him figs, dates, peaches, oranges, tangerines, lemons, and plums.
– Are you deaf, sir. I don’t want any of those, I want A FRUIT, said Mr H. The shopkeeper looked at him, mute and offended, but the fierce expression in his eyes told: What the hell of a heavenly fruit you are looking for?
– Why are you pining him? whispered Miss M., pulling her friend tentatively at the sleeve.
– Because I hate Plato, whispered Mr. H.
The shopkeeper kept looking, then a restrained impulse took over him and he fell a basketful of grapes on Mr. H.
Frightened, Miss M. run out of the shop. Mr. H. reached her at the street and, groping after the grapes in his hair, said objectively:
– This was a lesson in pure realism. As you can see, a fruit does not exist, and I am not mad.
– I think, said Miss M. with regret, that the shopkeeper’s name was Plato.
PAAVO HAAVIKKO
From Roads into the Distances
Translated by Herbert Lomas
And I ride through charted lands,
but the fowling hawks are being freed,
and I ride forward crouching,
cape flapping,
riding ahead of the squadrons threatening their king,
across fords and slopes,
hooves drumming under myriadmorphic trees:
I must ride from night into night
swift than the squadron of thought,
squander myself responding to the fullness of days
or throw in my hand.
From Native Soil
Translated by Bo Carpelan and Martin Allwood
When I tell you of the emperor you see him, the emperor, at the centre of this winter,
when I tell you of the emperor you see: it is winter, the emperor is alone,
the emperor, his image which becomes visible at dusk,
the emperor, this image,
dusk falls,
there is rubbish on the hillsides, an eagle’s nest, the dense dryness of the branches,
and the emperor is alone and visible,
he is in his country palace which is cold in the winter,
he is the one you can see most clearly when dusk is falling, and thought,
the bird, the great horned owl, your blind thought sees the emperor even in the dark.
I have led you astray and you stand before a winter mountain
and through the branches you are trying to see the emperor who does not exist,
when you close your eyes you can see the emperor again in his palace
and the image is clear, the image of this emperor,
and I have led you astary, now open your eyes and do not listen to me,
the power of the empire is in your heart, there it is strong,
the empire rises and falls at the winkling of an eye,
the empire rises and falls, now,
it falls when your eyes are opened.
From “The Finnish Cycle”
Translated by Leevi Lehto
The Prince Speaks
With all due respect this people hangs on tight to the wind.
People standing by the Porvoo gates: how do you do,
Good Finn, good day, I said,
how is the swine? and the chickens? how’s the wife doing?
I’ve taught myself to talk to the people in their own language,
but no people ever talks,
Finnish is no language, it is a way of sitting at one end of a bench with hair over your ears,
long-overdue talks about the rain and the wind, the inherited punch at the table,
sire, that’s the kind of language it is, impossible to speak,
it’s nothing but talk and never ends,
and we’re here on account of our sins now when March turns into Spring,
March is incomprehensibly gentle and turns into Spring,
sire, please say that half-grown talks fit into a bag,
a prince, if prince, is a prince and a poet, eating roast
while making his speech and thisways waggling his cradle, drinking bouillon
and burning his mouth.
An Ad Hoc Toast
Your Majesty, Tsar and Grand Prince, Alexander,
Prince whose virtue is the support of half the world,
O pour, ye Helsinki burgers, some sugar in your red wine
to keep the blood from tasting bitter,
sire, the right way to do justice to the tradition is quite to misunderstand it,
here it happens to be the traditional way,
it arrived here, via Bothnia, your Excellency, please say:
suomalainen, savolainen, pohjalainen, perkele.
Now you know Finnish. I just happen to be on my way to the language of this people
and let me be and let me drink and let me be quiet,
let me play and let me drink and keep singing my songs,
always the dead man’s voice praises the name of this country and this country,
it’s primer being carved in rock on the roadside west of the Kymi River,
and it reads Welcome, Welcome it reads, and
welcome carved in rock is unreason.
From Leaves As Leaves
Translated by Leevi Lehto
Where does the voice come from in us? What’s in the eyes?
Speech flows in the flowing world,
speech flows in the flowing world,
and you have to know almost everything by yourself.
From The Trees, All Threir Green
Translated by Keith Bosley
My grandfather the emperor was, as you know, mad,
wrote poems in the presence of others.
Your want war,
it is available.
You walk with a stiff gait
as soldiers always do, hysterics before an attack.
Hysteria is the sickness which is never cured.
The hysteric is a winner, he never gives in.
There is no point in my speaking. I read the poem:
The fog is so dense that the water cannot be seen from the
the bridge.
The flowers start to rage
when they are
to die meaninglessly.
PENTTI SAARIKOSKI
From What’s Going On Really?
Translated by Herbert Lomas
This began two years before the wars
in a village that now belongs to the Soviet Union
my sole recollection of the war is the fires they were great
they don’t come like that nowadays
I run to the window at the wail of the fire engine
I was on the move all my childhood
I turned communist
I went into the cemetery and studied the angels
they don’t come like that nowadays –
sella in curuli struma Nonius sedet
I burned books in Alexandria
I played the part of a stone and a flower and built a church
I wrote poems to myself myself the chair went up and down
high-backed ones like that don’t come nowadays
high poetry there is I’m expecting a cheque
Which is the mistake, the wrong way, or the right, not the Way
It’s + 2
I live in future times
I read tomorrow’s newspapers
I support Khrushchev carry the owl from room to room
I’m looking for the right place for it, This began
Translated by Anselm Hollo
I live in Helsinki.
Helsinki is the capital of Finland.
It lies by the sea 120 miles west of Leningrad.
Helsinki is an expanding city, and the rents are high.
We sit here surrounded by our woods, backs turned to the giant,
and stare at his image in a well’s eye. He wears a dark suit,
white shirt
and
silver-gray tie. In his country, everything is
quite different; there, people walk on or without their heads.
We sit here in the midst of our own woods,
but far away in the West is a land where huge eyes float by the
shore, and they’re watching us, here.
Helsinki is in the process of reconstruction according to the
plan made by Alvar Aalto.
Translated by Anselm Hollo
First seek ye the kingdom of pure
practical intellect
shreds of advertisements and headlines
shards of gramophone records feathers
lights shining arcs
the borders are well-lit
when the rush hour comes
and the hour of pile-up
sounds of breaking steel and people are heard in the dark
when the journey is broken, no one is on the right road
Translated by Pekka Virtanen
I love you
like a strange land
boulders and a bridge
like a lonely evening that smells of books
I walk toward you in the world
beneath the atmosphere
from the space between two lights
my thought which is sculptured and of you
Translated by Anselm Hollo
parliament has been dissolved
there would be pictures in the morning papers
President Kekkonen
looking concerned
Finland shown on the map
as a darker spot
like a broken eye
I listened to the radio and thought of
one summer morning
walked through some park
very early
on my way home
stayed up all night
looked at the shrubs and the sun rose
I was making a poem
small green cannon were guarding the sunrise
no people in the street yet
about the situation in Berlin
right-wingers can’t use these verbs anymore
their trenches are leaking
what is really
going on?
the air was warm that morning
it was like standing in a big room looking out
From Walking Wherever
Translated by Anselm Hollo
As I write this, it is August, 1965, and I know
that my present way of writing is becoming redundant: soon
I’ll be unskilled again, unable
to put myself into words, be Oudeis,
homing,
I am polytropos, unstable, much-traveled, yet always
Helsinki my city remains in my mind, in good order
and when I’m gone, it moves
like a tree, and the leaves
of that tree, I watch them moving,
having commerce
in August
the sun sets, I see it setting in leaves,
the lights coming on
everywhere,
Helsinki, in good order, in my mind, and beautiful,
I have written in many ways, taken stances,
almost suffocated in narrow academies, I have known
so many, read the books, now I am tired and
seek refuge for a while
in cultures where I’m an outsider, go
to Athens which does no longer exist,
converse with men who no longer exist,
seek refuge for a moment, not knowing what to do,
Oudeis, Odysseus, I am gone
and return.
I have often thought of past times, I was a little boy, confused,
monoglot,
and then as I stood in front of the dressier, reciting poems,
it was horrifying, all of it: the densest fog
I was told to call God,
and did I believe in God? was I happy
there, in the heart of the fog, not seeing a thing?
Helsinki is the model of my Weltanschauung.
Science hasn’t really gotten anywhere, there is no theory
that isn’t a membrane,
there is much to do, what empire’s agents
are spreading this gas of aphaty?
much to do,
the fallout of resignation
pollutes, poisons
the thousand flowers.
I have learnt Helsinki, have my ways through it, always
in the street,
always gone,
in other worlds,
worlds that no longer exist, and worlds
not here yet,
now no one talks to me
ancient mountains, on their slopes
shepherds
playing and dancing,
nothing is superfluous, nothing inevitable,
I came to this:
not the time now to write poems,
to have conversation,
not the time to gather with friends
to drink wine, read poems,
not the time now,
in my briefcase I carry a bomb, blow up Helsinki,
resign,
refrain from nostalgia, beautiful buildings,
old streets: if the people walking those streets
do not think new thoughts
they are streets no longer,
and should be destroyed.
As I can’t put myself into words, I am Oudeis, not wily,
not much-travelled; he’s been here
all the time, this spot,
alone, stood in the fog, quietly died,
shouted this shout, killed with a bow,
met them, killed them.
Well remember: often I sat in the room next door and watched
the others
dancing, circling, what was
my private property, my birthplace,
home-yard and window – below, the perennial
marigolds, blooming.
VÄINÖ KIRSTINÄ
Sunset
Translated by Aki Salmela
In the window a hand made of imagination arranges roots of a root and a bud of a bud.
Your heart is in my heart and a jungle of despair.
Over on a cloud I no longer have telephone, and I sleep well.
You wear a skirt, I a pair of shiny shoes. Campari and a sunset.
Spider crawls across the water.
We, the cannibals, like marzipan, we don’t need a course for rejuvenation so far.
Temples throb like a blue fishing boat on a sea. A small new island blossoms innocently on the water desert of the sea, it is imperative to love eternally…
Kisses of the moisture soften the high vaults, the colour of piss… the colour of honey. Meaningless and obscure light, heartbeat of a mountain.
A Story Of An Event
KARI ARONPURO
Coltrane*) (1964)
Translated by Aili and Austin Flint
clocks
clocks
that put outer space into sacks
the last hour of the day
he studies the assembly line of his daydreams
(when the sky bone
sinks in smouldering steel)
slowly ermerging
disappearing in twitches
heads
heads
faces
not connected with memories
translucent network of sewers
sterile objects
expressive footwear
bottles like exotic fish
behind him a rock quarry
not clothed in sounds of work
he has stood
on the trestle of the foundry rail
for a sniffly afternoon
he has stared
at the clefts in a rock
the fan of rails in the deserted railyard
now the wine of dusk floods over him
full of tin angels tin angels
the wind is blowing
newspapers
autumn leaves
blows
messages
telegrams
shelved dining implements
knives
spoons
forks
distorted shapes
clocks
clocks
which
all afternoon
he has stood
stared
on the trestle of the foundry rail
now the dusk
is flooded with
tin angels
and he rises up in the spirals
of his daydreams
following a flock
blameless
television antennas
traffic signs
burned at the stake
shrapnel of the perspective of idleness
he stands
on the trestle of the foundry rail
flood of
tin angels
he dreams of
myriads of
spark plugs
hot plates
shells containers
vegetables east in brass
frozen foods
lamp posts
brake lights
sockets
fever thermometers
under a vomiting moon
he examines the assembly line of his daydreams
heads
faces
not conneeted to memories
sterile objects …
behind him a rock quarry
not clothed in sounds of work
clocks
clocks
putting time into sacks
* impulse! mono A-21 Out Of This World
JYRKI PELLINEN
From Kuuskajaskari (1964)
Translated by Herbert Lomas
The depiction of life is not sweet
only blue rooms with one mistress in the cupboard
a blue shining with secreted memories in
and then at the very last one must go back again to day-
light, it means: those songs must be sung again
and there’s nothing else
but I that now am this and that
can speak a sheer lie, it is
nine months south, it’s a place
like a blue cinnabar: and the sea’a yachs-
men are worthy of praise, let times fly up
let songs be raised up, I mean
but then remember how this
would be mirrored by the woman in the cupboard
my cyclorama is not my conception
wise eyelashes from the sky: they flutter down
from above everything and such shadows
always come to the earth
as are seen against the cyclorama everywhere
in all literature of the world
Light is a light substance you can’t gather it
into one basket and, if you could, the
rooms would have to be blue, the lovers would have to be
sorrowful, some like best to walk by the river
banks and others play with French
pistols, but archives have to be able to be everywhere
in castle-dust (but the children sat aside, perhaps in trees,
but if needed there are no children, there’s a sublime sorrow,
the reason we beat time) and Musset, Musset the king
of poets, whom we serve, this is no world
here no goodbyes are said even in a blue room
when friends arrive and the loved one is in the cupboard
alone the winds alone the remains of them I
claim the world is actually a wrong one
this time the king of poets is Corneille!
fires eyes I love the poets of all
times, so that they’d have their names taken away so that
there’d be a castle like a full stop: there’s a big house
that looks into the water that lurches inside a book
a book read, this is a May through all the aeons
and not a single detail has been told
of the most challenging deed of valour
Tree
Translated by Herbert Lomas
A tree grew into a bar. It was an oak from altogether elsewhere. The people gathered casually round to look at it: no one laughed at it. They were all creatures of habit and wouldn’t have been surprised even if the tree hadn’t grown there. It pushed all the dishes as it moved, the animals didn’t understand their joy. The joyful animals. And the tree turned into a road, so that all this had to be wiped out. The dishes survived all right. The people survived all right. A man walked across the yard. The man looked doggish, but there was nothing doggy at the other end. What next: the parlour ceiling collapsed into the field and the children died. The event was an event and aroused great sadness, but no sorrow. Since this tree couldn’t apparently do anything whatever, it settled down there and died. That’s the way everything at the roadside and in the bar dies. Since the boy had heard this – that his father had indeed preceded him – or so they prentended. Thus boredom led to everything accidentally coming to a halt in order of seniority. The fact is, the boy didn’t get his wish. The tree alone grew, and grew wrong, as it grew from the roof down to the earth. He left the road – thought the ones who all think alike – they too saw the tree behind the road. Now it so happened that once there was a tree that didn’t sidestep anything. It grew all over the place under the bridges, became a beam, then a railing everywhere. This tree was a proper tree, it kept order of seniority, but didn’t care where it went, it was everywhere, so contrary to what anyone thought it also grew into God, and then it turned green and flowered when it grew old, it was the same tree, it had seen life as it had desired, but now it had failed and it didn’t forget that, later it came out of the north country where settled in middle of the road, because there wasn’t a single bird there.
POST: 2004
JOUNI TOSSAVAINEN
From “Broken Current” (Katkovirta)
Translated by Hildi Hawkins
Null point
When darkness strikes
fire, it sets in motion
the time of light
From Europe to Savo
greetings from your road
to our bank
1. Pain spot
a wet, black bough
in white Finland
a monument to lasting beauty *)
From the Varkaus junction
180 kilometres
to Sukeva jail
and the same back again
in the same jail
in another stream
with a pair of grooves as bars
I cannot steer this tin cell
and the oncoming lights blind me
in this dark basket
we descend toward the depths
our rear lights the pain spots of the girl racer
she’s so happy,
Tiina, she steals time from time
she does not die, she has the right to kill
two streams, two rivers of wheels
descend toward the depths
with the broken line of Tuonela**) between them
Styx, Styx, Styx’s,
the gate black and white,
black or white, on or off
the yellow line
calls a halt to
the Morse code of life and death
by stopping I take
receive from the road power
I absorb
the entire landscape’s
round road at the stop
rest in one place
memory and thought
unity of beginning and end
only in my head
the platform of time
I drive off the road of authority
and it is a very strange feeling ***)
8. End point
Simo Leinonen’s memorial tree
three lighted spruces
at the Kuopio junction
on the spruce carpet of the sawdust trail
all the tractor tracks
toward the sky
all the snowy winter
look and bow
in the darkness of this city
your memorial statue is a festival of light
stars stars
and three golden spruces
father, son and the tracks of the tin tractor
relate in astonishment
how such low lamps
can achieve such high velocities
*) ‘Man-Made America’, Yale University Press, 1963
**) The river of Manala, or Hades, in ancient Finnish mythology
***) The astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon
HANNU HELIN
From ctrl alt del
tyhjä taivas
kivi ei molskahda
kumahda ihminen
helähtää
tyhjää…
fobioita
baro baso batho
niin se on
the only thing
that looks good
on me
is u
radost i mladost
yet to come
hers is the face
milyj nakonets milyj
zvezdoliki…
kopo konio merto
lattean huomautuksen
kaiku sataa
mustetta ohi lensi
lentävä rusetti
esse est perseestä
midnite at noon
relimbrance of things
past revisited
siivet harallaan
taivaan sisälmykset
lutra lutra
shuifeng
ja purgativa
ansioituneiden
kryptassa
olent
onvat
olemmette
definitely maybe
en la puta vida
la vida es un carnival
kaiken lihan
tie teillä
tiety
mättö
millä
miserere
misericordia
mecum…
all wrongs
reserved
ordovico viricordo
asno no es
nada ne nado
keuhkot rykii
sataa ainaski
tuhatta velttoo
savuu siks
tihee kuulu
kummalliseen mahtu
mahdottomaan
jos leivos
niin kynä
talamuksesta
mantelitumakkeeseen
tämä ominaisuus
lit lit lit
black fire startin’
sittin’ on tombstone
boozin’ moonshine
‘n jake blues
doggin’ toothin’
tea baggin’
innit wotsit
if wishes
all the tired horses
lankeemuksen edellä
suuret sanat
sokrates syö
hemlokkia
puusta pudonnut
laivan jättänyt
mahram bilqisin temppeli
vehnäkumpu
gasellin kaksoset
ja hesbonin lammikot
urbs in horto
usus est tyrannus
tides of darkness
ja-sosla-s-uma
sky fits heaven
but witch grass is safe
word to pitch
a tent upon
eyes cold
eyes cream
mortadarthella
schadenfreud
an i for an eye
wtf is this
angelflyingtooclosetotheground
a mind is like
a parachute
it doesn’t work
if it’s not
open…
AKI SALMELA
From Word in Progress (2004)
Ode to Ern Malley
The umbel of markings on the carved time
entangles staircase of rococo evening
introverted obelisk of the pond-lilies
incestuous.
And consolations!
Palms! and trespassing
transposed version blowing this lily 1495,
I a gibbet in curious
Social Process. Sky
he who — white Adonai:
to themselves.
Assert: the caterpillar.
Courage
Cage said something. Its nature
parameters more language.
It’s about the courage
but the fact is that nobody is Cagean again.
Cage said something, it highlights the formal
properties of language
when I started using the work naked.
The good is in ideas. Any form
is poured into such work It’s poured into such
a radical nature. Fluid and the good radical.
Radical and interesting. I just gave you more language
glued to type. Fluid and will. I started using
such a xerox nature. It’s very complicated. My method
very complicated. My the piece, it’s complicated. My
gave you more
started using the aspects of the piece, it’s very
Cagean again.
The genuine evanescence of life
Stream of words, narration as a frail anguish
of lamentable failure. They stayed
quietly closing our own inferior century. He
talked, it was grotesque;
even our love lives were sitting together
with great seriousness. All attempts fail,
but we must try that old paper
in increasingly grotesque situations. Unquestionably,
it’s worth the great caring, and within the individual
communication lies the mean old paper with great
integrity.
We were sitting in the impossibility
of establishing the space of destined life.
Time is a quietly closing door.
He’d eternity, his currency and the anguish
of individual with a stream of words.
This is destined to fail. An old door,
frail as communication, and the narration
with it’s sense of loneliness.
Impossibility of quietly closing the genuine
evanescence
of life; a lamentable door. Alienation as our love.
Within the grotesque century of situations
they met again.
All eaters stayed to chat about life
MARKO NIEMI
Searching For Laura (2004)
Webmaster All contents Copyrighted
life of laura ingalls wilder, Little House
has a new spot for her website. Please
and blues. You’ve heard her music,
the designer, who died the year
WILDER. The first book, Little House
contact others researching these
as some songs that include more familiar
dancing and singing along. She tours with
Girl : family and friends of author
and background information. – Learn more
address. – New Composition with
the host of Working Assets Radio and author
Kvasnosky. Inside, you can find more
to carry on. As the day began to break
you are looking for leisure, good food, art
News. – style. Laura paints tiny art
Olympic Games. – About the
photos, computer links, communication
you are looking for leisure, good food, art
quilt instructor and creator of art
direttamente al contenuto della pagina.
donaldson luke dougherty anne hall
Shop” archives or tune in live
dancing and singing along. She tours
Welcome and thanks for coming! Enjoy! (All
browserbut you don’t have
– Hosted by Laura Flanders
and background information. – Learn
The Modern Age mailing list and stay
– Hamilton 305. Office Hours: Wednesday
help us to better organize what we learn
Visitatore N.° Skip presentazione. – Learn
Wednesday, June 30, 2004. Yesterday
and teacher in the San Francisco Bay
and creator of art quilts. Learn
LAURA. Where Louisiana is a world
laura. TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2003. Join
sorry. RPGs: Hippocratic Oath, a run
Buy Books Today, Laura Bush -Jewish World
Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in
If you see another McDonald’s ad run
to join a choir in the universe. She had
dancing and singing along. She tours
family? This Webquest – Laura Flanders
(Fast Connection). To download
for Chocoloate, The Law of Love. Read
2004. Yesterday – Baseball! The Mariners
and hopefully contact others
to glory swathed in a get – Upload
List: Sign up and get the inside
are looking for leisure, good food, art
feet, dancing and singing along. She tours
so that it looks like a 3rd grade
– style. Laura paints tiny art
This Webquest – Laura Flanders
APPENDIX: TWO AMERICANS
ANSELM HOLLO
That Old Sauna High
to make the vapor bath
a frame three sticks
meet at the top
stretch woollen cloth
take care
the seams are tight
a tent & into it
a dish
with red-hot stones
then take some hemp-seed
& creep in
the seed
onto those stones:
at once
great smoke!
“gives off a vapor
unsurpassed
by any bath
we have in greece”
410 b.c.
eyes watering
by candlelight
uncle herodotus
penned these instructions
adding “the scythians”
enjoy it so
they howl with pleasure”
getting so clean
all clean inside
Four Stills From “The Poet”
for Tom Rawfort
the poet, drunk, is seen
composing a poem to the revolutionaries
of the world.
it is to be a long poem
while working on page 9 he realizes
that he is stone cold sober:
he stops, goes back,
reads what he has written
starts crossing out words –
lines – sections –
whole pages.
one line remains,
on page five. it says:
the heroes, their mouths full of
it is not
a very good line. maybe
he only forgot to cross it out.
we cannot
ask him.
he has fallen asleep.
*
the poet,
asleep,
addresses his friends
you, my brethen
in the dream:
remember the time fo the night
we have agreed
to light our pipes of peace
remember out pact
be gently mad children
at the appointed hour
paint the blue sign
on your foreheads
knowing each other’s rooms
we can be together
remember
no one must know
our wov not to grow
up in their world
*
in the morning
the poet looks out
& sees a quiet residential neighbourhood
look at it long enough
& it won’t go away
talk to it long enough
& it will yawn
scream at it long enough
& it will dawn
upon you that rome
was not overthrown
in a day
*
he returns
to bed:
there is,
possibly
someone
there.
KALEVI LAPPALAINEN
Unmasked Beings
you come, present quite here
soon you’ll go between serious and gay
sneaking away and swaying your hand
you are planning to construct a vessel
and donating it
you’ll travel for summer to the country
to subdue ideas and insects
Officially In Dark
I opened the ice-box where a great amount of eyes
stared at me without tears without expression
I shut the door
In the closet I hung myself
on the wooden hangers
greeted some other friends
who answered without gestures without sounds
In the morning
I stepped up the office stairs
as if nothing ever happens
The Borderline Of Dream And Real
walking-stick philosopher phrase slept under a hyachint edge
a loaf in his hand and a missile in his other dreaming
about quiet days nights when cuckoo is calling into the night
fishes cheated worms out of hooks the rainbow would stay on top
of pines for next summer the hunter would offer lumps of sugar
between his lips to bears larks woul give him a private concert
in the spirit of earth and heaven the apples would swell out of stars
would jump silver grasshoppers ferns would speak up the lilies
and the violets would gleam the cows would eat only four-foil leaves
a postman would bring only love-letters: notes of exlamation
and in all languages I love you
NOTES ON THE AUTHORS
Eino Leino (1878-1926), still the bard of the country, a skilled versifier renown for the musical quality of his diction.
Aaro Hellaakoski (1893-1952) was one of the leading poets of the time of “building the nation” from the declaration of independence to WWII. The poems here are from his famous collection Jääpeili (The Ice Mirror, 1927). In the original, most of “The Pike’s Song” was in gothic type; this way:
Tuomas Anhava (1927-2001) the theorist of the Modernists and the “Literary Pope” of his time, published six volumes of poetry and translated, among others, Ezra Pound.
Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921-1995) after two volumes in a more traditional diction, Manner’s Tämä matka (This Journey, 1956) was one of the great breakthroughs for the Modernist movement. Characterized by a strong “metaphysical” undercurrent, her poetry is at times deadly serious, at times playful and humorous.
Paavo Haavikko (b. 1931) perhaps the leading poet in the Modernist group, winner of the Neustad Prize of Literature in 1983. A conservative pessimist, and something of an eternal dissident of Finnish literary and social life, he likes to write about history, power, money, and the like. He is also a succesful businessman and a publisher.
Pentti Saarikoski (1937-1983) the ruffian of the Modernists. In the Sixties, he was for a short time involved with the Communist Party, even ran for the Parliament. A spokeman for “open” and “engaged” poetry, he also translated Greek classics, published the first translation into Finnish of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and drunk himself dead at an early age (as did Leino). – Incidentally, the statement in his poem that “Helsinki (…) lies by the sea 120 miles west of Leningrad” is not correct. The phrase originates from an English travel guide where the author got miles and kilometers confused.
Väinö Kirstinä (b. 1936) has been called “the Arch-Avantgardist of Finnish poetry”. “Sunset” and “A Story Of An Event” are from his influental Luonnollinen tanssi (A Natural Dance, 1966). Kirstinä has translated Guillaume Baudelaire and André Breton, among others.
Kari Aronpuro (b. 1940) author of eighteen books of poetry and an important novel-in-collage, Aperitiff: avoin kaupunki (Aperitiff: An Open City, 1964), Aronpuro makes extended use of found and circulated material, shoving an acute and highly original interest in “the life the signs”, as his subject matter might de described.
Jyrki Pellinen (b. 1941) besides being a prolific poet, Pellinen is also a painter and a musician. He is often characterized by citing the title of one of his poetry books, So contrary to anyone. In 2004, Pellinen published a remarkable volume of “three minor novels”, Dostojevskin suomalainen sihteeri (Dostoyevsky’s Finnish Secretary).
Jouni Tossavainen (b. 1963), author of nine books of poetry along with several books of prose, responsible for introducings Finns to the PoetrySlam scene. “Broken Current” is from his Liiketoimintasuunnitelma (A Business Plan, 2004).
Hannu Helin (b. 1944) has published fifteen books of poetry. Ctrl alt del is available as pdf at http://tuli-savu.nihil.fi/poeetat/helin/ctrl_alt_del.pdf. He has made the process of writing his next book public at his blog, http://metukimchalomot.blogspot.com/. For his poetry in English, see http://www.pulvis.net/.
Aki Salmela (b. 1976). Salmela’s first collection of poems, Sanomattomia lehtiä (Untold Leaves, 2004) was shorlisted for the influental Helsingin Sanomat literary prize. In 2004, Salmela also published a volume of translations from John Ashbery, Valveillaoloa (Wakefulness). Word In Progress, a chap-book in English, is available as pdf at http://tuli-savu.nihil.fi/julkaisut/salmela_word_in_progress.pdf.
Marko Niemi (b. 1974) is a translator, poetry engineer, programmer, and editor of Tuli&Savu Net poetry portal at http://tuli-savu.nihil.fi. The sonnet sequence “Searching For Laura” was composed using my Google poem generator (http://www.leevilehto.net/google/google.asp), note how the pieces tend to rhyme. For Marko Niemi’s work in digital poetry, see http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/marniemi/etnodada/. Another Finland-based digital poet to follow is Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, see http://textualconjectures.xpressed.org/ and his other blogs listed there.
Anselm Hollo Anselm Hollo was born in Finland, 1934, and published his first books of poetry there. In mid-Sixties he moved to London to work for the BBC, and then to the United States, where he now lives and teaches in Bolder, Colorado. He has translated many Finnish poets into English. The poems here are from Poems-Runoja, a bilingual edition published in Finland in the Sixties.
Kalevi Lappalainen (1940-1988) published eight volumes of poetry, his American carreer starting in 1966 with Outside the alphabet; my selections are from that book, which contains Lappalainen’s own translations of his work in Finnish. Lappalainen died in a fire accident in Emporia, Kansas.
For more stuff:
A way to measure time. Contemporary Finnish Literature. SKS, Helsinki 1992.
Contemporary Finnish Poetry. Edited and translated by Herbert Lomas. Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle 1991.
Electric Verses at http://www.electricverses.net/sakeet.php?poet=0&poem=0&language=3. Contemporary Finnish poetry mainly from the Nineties, in original and in translations.
Enchanting Beasts. Modern Women Poets of Finland. Edited and translated by Kirsti Simonsuuri. Forest Books, London & Boston 1990.
Paavo Haavikko: Selected Poems. Translated by Anselm Hollo. Carcanet Press, Manchester 1991
Anselm Hollo: Sojourner Microcosms. New & selected poems 1959-1977 with a Foreword by Robert Creeley & an Afterwords by Edward Dorn. Blue Wind Press, Berkeley 1977.
Eeva-Liisa Manner: Fog Horses. Translated by Ritva Poom. Cross Cultural ommunications, New York 1986.
Eeva-Liisa Manner: Selected Poems. Translated by Herbert Lomas. Making Waves, Guildford 1997.
Modern Scandinavian Poetry. The Panorama of Poetry 1900-1980. General Editor Martin Allwood. Eagleye Books International Persona Press, 1986.
Pentti Saarikoski: Poems 1958-1980. Edited and translated from Finnish by Anselm Hollo. The Toothpaste Press, West Branch, Iowa 1983.
Pentti Saarikoski: Trilogy. Translated from the Finnish by Anselm Hollo. La Alameda Press, New Mexico, 2004
Skating On the Sea. Poetry from Finland. Edited & translated by Keith Bosley. Bloodaxe Books. Finnish Literature Society, Wiltshire 1977.
Snow in May. An Anthology of Finnish Writing 1945-1972. Ed. Richard Dauenhauer and Philip Binham. Associated University Presses, Rutherford 1975.
Thank You for These Illusions: Poems by Finnish Women Writers, transl. and ed. by Anne Fried, Helsinki 1981.
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