Miia Toivio, ”Miia With Two Eyes” (title of her blog), may be the one actor at the scene of the Finnish poetry of the 2000′s who is most connected with everything else in it – in this (complicated) roll of thread, not unlike the one she writes about in her Loistaen olet (Shining, thou art, Teos 2007): ”A red thread is rolled in my stomach, / and when it wakes up, everything will change, / the music will stop, and the chairs alike.”
Born 1974, a poetry activist, an organizator, editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine, Tuli&Savu (Fire&Smoke), at the time of its most crucial importance, 2003 to 2006, poet, a charming and compelling performer, a debatist, a critic – re-reading today her 2007 poems, I cannot help thinking of her, anachronistically, and in a friendly amusement, as the young Pound of the new Finnish poetry.
Yet not only on account of those threads and strings. There are other affinities. So, where Ezra Pound came from America (which to him meant leaving the country-side), Miia is out from the Southern Ostrobothnia, from the Finnish Plains, something which, in many ways, may be heard in her (personal and poetic) voice: in its wide and long vowels – Miia with two i’s – apt to replace consonants as the building logs of her lines, yielding her flute-sound; in its often folk-dance-like rhythms, and in a certain thouroughness of her phrases. And in much the way the ”provincial” Pound came to be the most devotedly internationalist poet of the Modernist period, I tend to see the Ostrobothnian Miia as one of the most urbane poets of her generation.
Urbane she is, to me, firstly, in her high awareness of influence. More than many others, she has let the legacy of Modernisms (and the Finnish one especially) immerse herself, as in a beautiful poem that was written as a faithful palimpsest on a fragment from Talvipalatsi (The Winter Palace) by Paavo Haavikko, yet is completely independent from it. Both in her activity, and, more importantly, in the processes of her own poetry, she also comes across as someone very well aware of herself as one who has influence. Here I’m thinking of, say, the complicated patterns of addressing (as in the inaugural line of Loistaen olet: ”Open [the/a] mouth.”), promising and promise-taking, instructing (”Goodbye Modern. (…) Already I am dreaming of a herd that dreams of me. (…) Be careful with those adjectives.”), of questioning (as in: ”Whose is the chisel of speech, after all? Whose the high image?”), and confessing (”Once upon a time I was (…) indeed, only once”) you’d find everywhere in her work.
Both of these qualities in turn seem to contribute to a third kind of awareness – that of the writing, or the form of it, as such. Her poems have been described, and they may self-describe themselves, as ”machines”, yet I’d rather speak about their close relationship with the physiological and the body here. They would often seem composed of organs that, like those of the human body, are always ”at their places”, in a multi-purposeful ”connection” with their ”whole”, yet always also displaced – their very ”connectedness” consisting of their always reaching for something else, something beyond (a new position, another organ, another body: what, on a general level, is known as ”desire”).
Machines, bodies, beings – this, finally, may describe her poems’ rare independence from their author as well, something which again, paradoxically, makes it possible for her to address, instruct, command, and implore them as well, and make them do things – once more not unlike my candidate for a male predecessor. ”Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied”, the young Pound wrote (”Commission”, 1913). And here’s Miia, in a reference to Eino Leino, a Finnish contemporary of the great Modernist puller of strings: ”The song of my heart is in crumbles in the forest (…) so long I came to run after it (…) What do you think of it, how does it / feel to you, does it feel like being there?”
To me, at least, it always does (as not all songs do). I think this is why I like to permit it to address me.
Leevi Lehto
[Excerpts from MT’s work translated by me – LL.]
Paal Bjelke Andersen
Paal Bjelke Andersen
Jonas (J) Magnusson
Gunnar Berge
Audun Lindholm
Olga Ravn
Gunnar Berge
Mathias Danbolt
Paal Bjelke Andersen
Cathrine Strøm
Politikk Poetikk Praksis
Lyra Ekström Lindbäck
Susanne Christensen
Susanne Christensen
Leif Høghaug
Olga Ravn
Leevi Lehto
Julie Sten-Knudsen
Audun Lindholm
Ane Nydal
Miia ToivioMiia Toivio">Miia ToivioMiia ToivioLeevi Lehto
Att bli ved I og IIAtt bli ved I and II
Fredrik Nyberg
Beata Berggren, Martin Högström, Peter Thörneby
Falsche FreundeFalsche Freunde
Uljana Wolf
Happiness: Poems After RimbaudHappiness: Poems After Rimbaud
Sean Bonney
Cecilia Vicuña
Tarnac, un acte préparatoireTarnac, un acte préparatoire
Jean-Marie Gleize
-->Audiatur Waste Land er en poesibiennale som arrangeres 12. til 15. april i Bergen. Dette er femte gang Audiatur – Festival for ny poesi avholdes, første gang var i 2003. Festivalen har i 2005, 2007 og 2009 publisert omfattende kataloger som er tilgjengelige gjennom Audiatur bokhandel.
I år tar festivalen udgangspunkt i T.S. Eliots berømte dikt «The Waste Land» (1922), et dikt som i stor grad består av sitater («a heap of broken images»), et ikonisk modernistisk dikt formet som et apokalyptisk kor av stemmer. Audiatur Waste Land er ikke en hyllestfestival til et kanonisert verk, men vi ønsker å bruke diktet som konseptuelt rammeværk, som inspiration og som «ryggrad» i programmet. I forbindelse med festivalen produseres et innholdsrikt programhefte, to oversettelser av fransk og iransk poesi og siden en festivalavis som samler dokumentation og materiale i etterkant av festivalen. Politikk Poetikk Praksis vil være tilstede under festivalen og både blogge og spontanprodusere materiale. Med deltakere fra Iran, Frankrike, Tyskland, USA, Norge, Sverige, Finland og Danmark presenterer Audiatur Waste Land fire dager med oplesninger, forelesninger, konsert, utstilling, performance, paneldebatter med mere på sentrale steder i Bergen.
I etterkant av Audiatur Waste Land holdes ytterligere to arrangementer i 2012: I Oslo 25. mai inviterer vi i samarbeid med Folkebiblioteket og Deichmanske bibliotek, avd. Grünerløkka til et møte med den fransk-amerikanske forleggeren, litteratur- og kulturteoretikeren Sylvère Lotringer kjent fra forlaget Semiotext(e) og 21. juli kommer litteraturprofessoren og avantgardespesialisten Marjorie Perloff til Bergen.
Velkommen!
Arbeidsgruppen består i 2012 av Karl Larsson, Cathrine Strøm, Martin M. Sørhaug, Simen Hagerup, Paal Bjelke Andersen, Thomas Lundbo og Susanne Christensen.