two poems in space

Arto Melleri in 1994 (still from TV interview)

[Image source: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2014/02/20/dave-melleri-royhka-mauri-kunnas-ja-markku-sensuroimattomina]


About once a year someone gets in touch to ask me about some poetry query. This poetry consultancy of mine is free, extremely unpopular, and rarely leads to helpful results, as my knowledge of poetry is patchy to say the least. However, I always enjoy it.




This was a case in point. A brief IM exchange with Yaşarcan Özdemir, a student at Anadolu University, last week led me to this personal anthology web page put together by Lee Bajuniemi: http://saamileb.tripod.com/PoetryByLee/Translations.html


The contents, Lee tells us, are Finnish poems translated into English. They seem generally popular and accessible pieces, by fairly well-known poets. Yaşarcan and I were debating the final two poems.




The penultimate poem is attributed to "Arto Mellar" (= Arto Melleri, presumably).





PROPORTIONS

A person's life: width of a hand
I have heard it said
I look at the early morning sky:
from star to star
even less
The happiness that you wait for,
something that
cannot be measured, only possible
if not measured.
At sunrise small birds, without bursting,
sing out loud the morning dew,
the bright sound of countless droplets. 















The final poem is attributed to Anselm Hollo:









 HEAVY JARS #6

Given the heavy jar full of all relevant
information, he dropped it on the sidewalk
and burst out laughing as the container and
its contents shattered and scattered in the
raging blizzard; he had been on his way to
present it to her, for her to dispose of as
she wished, but with the surreptitious expec-
tation that they might "go through it" together.

Now, the absurdity of the understanding had
become blatantly apparent, and he vowed to
tell the next full moon that he abjured such
subterfuge for ever: silence and starkness,
these were the perennial conditions of birth,
& love & death, the so-called great subjects,
the ones no one could ever say anything but
the dramatically obvious about.



"Proportions" isn't a poem I've seen before, but I feel I recognize it as Melleri's kind of thing;  popular nature-mysticism, a sort of precipitous visionary insight, indifference to modern poetic schools.




More on Arto Melleri (1956 - 2005):




http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/arto-melleri-on-zola.html





It's possible that Anselm Hollo was also the translator of the poems by Arto Melleri and the others, but Lee doesn't say so, not explicitly anyway.


"Heavy  Jars #6" is, I'm guessing, an original poem in English, not a translation: casual and conversational, deploying standard-issue beat-poet ampersands. combining the well-wrought urn, the golden bowl and the empty vessel in its floaty transparent medium.






Anselm Hollo (1934 - 2013) was Finnish by birth but nearly all his forty books of poetry were written in English: he moved to the UK in c. 1959, then to the USA in 1967. The above poem presumably came from the chapbook Heavy Jars (1977).




Camille Martin wrote about the chapbook here:




https://rogueembryo.com/2009/07/08/hard-to-say-whether-the-jarsve-gotten-any-lighter/




The two poems converge on a similar claim:  that the most important things are beyond expression. In Melleri's poem  happiness cannot be measured, in Hollo's poem no-one can say anything about birth and love and death, apart from the "dramatically obvious".




*


The only other text of either poem that I could track down is here:


https://tiffanycreek7.com/2015/07/10/proportions/


(where "Proportions", the Melleri poem above, is attributed to Hollo.)




On the other hand, Yaşarcan had been told that both poems were Melleri originals, translated by Hollo.


My attempts to locate a presumed Finnish original of "Proportions" have been an abject failure.


*


Poems that circulate on the internet often remind me of medieval poems in manuscripts. In both cases the transmission method of multiple copying is very likely to wear away everything that isn't embedded in the text itself.  Metadata, such as title, author, translator, original publication, date, etc are all highly vulnerable to being lost or discarded. And when a poem does appear with a title or author's name, these are not to be accepted without question.








Anselm Hollo in 1965

[Image source: https://hoppyx.com/anselm-hollo/. Photo by John "Hoppy" Hopkins (1937 - 2015), the London counterculture dynamo, photographer and political activist.]

Arto Melleri on Zola

Arto Melleri in 1982

[Image source: http://www.ts.fi/kulttuuri/kirjat/257958/Aina+taysilla]

The Finnish poet Arto Melleri (1956 - 2005) “attacks Zola as a new-style writer of a media age, and invokes the poets of the past as alternative sources of insight and guides to truth.” (Contemporary Finnish Poetry, ed. Herbert Lomas). 

Melleri's career as a poet more or less came to an end in 1998, when he was hit by a car and suffered brain damage.  (He also wrote plays and short stories).  He was a Bohemian writer somewhat in the Saarikoski mode, at least as far as alcohol was concerned, but his preoccupations were quite different. Saariskoski was a displaced Karelian and his lifelong debate was with Lenin. Melleri was an Ostrobothnian with a family tradition of Laestadian mysticism; he had an antipathy to agitprop poetry and a commitment to a truth beyond history.


Essay on Melleri by Immo Pekkarinen, discussing the above Zola thought: http://www.nbl.fi/~nbl3145/eighties1.htm

To Melleri, realism only "replaced the roses of the mirror-frames with snakes" ( “vaihdoit peilinraamien ruusut käärmeisiin” – Zola, NSV: 93), leaving the principle of reflection and representation untouched. Film and television are embodiments and extensions of the representational dreams of the Enlightment. In the modern world, thus, the romantic ideal of living presence is displaced by a fascination with ever newer and better means to mediate and multiply representations. The connecting of people into the "field of electric experience" rips them violently from their traditional life worlds.

And he quotes these lines (from "The Ferris Wheel")  about the destructive coming of TV to rural Ostrobothnia:


The runaway newsreel
gallops ever new images into the room.

Silent
in a movement too fast of the Ferris wheel
sit grandpapa, Daddy, mamma,
the hand, the maid, brother, sister
and Hankkija's agricultural agent!


Wikipedia article on Conservative Laestadianism, a strict form of Lutheranism still common in western Finland.

"Conservative Laestadians often have large families due to their belief that contraception is a sin. They believe that God is the lord of birth and death. They do not have a television at home because of the showing of offensive and sinful programing. They do not drink alcohol or listen to pop music. Recently however, the Internet is blurring the line between television and no television as many watch television programming on the Internet."


Essay on Melleri by Maris Gothóni: http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1996/12/winged-fever/

Gothóni says: "Interviewed, Melleri has always spoken against stylistic trends and conceptions, things like ‘postmodernism’. The truth lies in the decomposed and the materialised. His polemical poem against Emile Zola’s naturalism asserts that perspectiveless painting is closer to reality than a photograph or a telegraph."


Poem by Arto Melleri (translator unknown), found here: http://neba.finlit.fi/booksfromfinland/bff/198/poems3_melleri.html



You experience human growth
by becoming more insignificant

By seeing clearly up ahead
how the sail of ambition
no longer lends shade

Experience human growth
by becoming lighter

When useless ballast has been tossed
overboard
it stays there, in the wake,
floats or sinks, for fish or fowl

Human growth
by not despising the sea chart, the compass

By no longer naming your ships
Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria
By knowing that America has existed
before it was found

Human growth
by not naming everything all the time

By not being so stupid
By not being stupid?


*

Herbert Lomas' translation of Melleri's poem "Zola" appears both in Contemporary Finnish Poetry (Bloodaxe, 1991), and in the more ample selection in Three Finnish Poets (London Magazine Editions, 1999).

In the earlier part of the poem, Melleri contrasts the poet of former times:

The poet
     lit by his secret lantern
         did what your brilliant gaslight
              could never accomplish, Émile.

Later on, he writes:

The radiotelegraph and the photograph
     have told more lies
         than perspectiveless painting
             or the gossip steaming
in old biddies' skirts from washhouse to washhouse.

*

But still, I can't agree with Melleri about Zola, though I've pondered this thought (at least in its reported form) for many years.

I believe that naturalism is what we need most and is what we writers have been resisting ever since. Something in naturalism.

The deficiencies of electronic media are still understood to be deficiencies only because of a naturalistic standard, namely, the standard of our consciousness which believes in truth.