Essays

Works in progress

Issue 3/2008 | Archives online, Essays, On writing and not writing

Writer's block

Olli Jalonen’s latest novel, 14 solmua Greenwichiin (’14 knots to Greenwich’, 2008), was 19 years in the making. He ponders the joys and tribulations of such a slow maturation

When you spend years or decades writing the same book, what is the drive, passion or compulsion that keeps the cogs turning through the quieter months? Or are the months when you don’t write silent at all? Isn’t it the case that the core of a text or a book is born out of a state of peaceful nothingness?

More often than not, the most important ideas, the strongest details and the sturdiest structures of the art of writing come into being somewhere other than at the computer keyboard. One of the greatest benefits and pleasures of a writer’s work is carrying that work around in mind and body. At these times the writing machinery is whirring, quietly, calmly, freely and unpressured. More…

Blocks and locks

Issue 2/2008 | Archives online, Essays, On writing and not writing

Writer's block

For the writer, not being able to write is just one of the profession’s occupational hazards, says the author Eeva Kilpi. She recalls a particularly debilitating attack of the affliction, and offers suggestions for escaping it

I had no idea I was currently suffering from writer’s block until I was asked to describe the condition.

Now I feel – as I sit at my oId, muscle-powered, Facit typewriter – that a horror of words is the first and normal reaction every time I have to begin a piece (let alone a book). Words dart into hiding like a frightened flock of birds that has barely settled to rest. (And now I hear successful, prolific colleagues rushing to explain how easy it is to use a computer to correct mistakes and move entire paragraphs even from one chapter to another, but I am paralysed by the very thought of a flickering screen, ready and waiting, and of the fateful key by pressing which one may destroy an entire immortal manuscript, as I have heard has happened to some people.) More…

The light itself

Issue 1/2008 | Archives online, Essays, On writing and not writing

Writer's block

What should you do when writer’s block strikes? Lie down and wait for inspiration to return, Petri Tamminen suggests

All autobiographical depictions of writer’s block are fundamentally flawed and false. If you happen to be suffering from writer’s block, these accounts make for painful reading.

The wittier, more carefully crafted and closely observed an account the writer gives of his affliction, the more gut-wrenching it feels. It’s like treading water and preparing to drown and having to listen to someone in dry clothes standing on the deck of a ship recalling a close call he had back in the seventies.

On the other hand, when you’re suffering from writer’s block everything annoys you. Good books seem overwhelmingly good, so much so that you realise you can never achieve that level of greatness. Similarly, bad books seem so overwhelmingly bad that you wonder why anyone bothers reading books and realise that it’s pointless trying to write one. More…

The search goes on

Issue 4/2007 | Archives online, Essays, On writing and not writing

Writer's block

The Finlandia Prize-winning author Kjell Westö recalls his literary adolescence, and the moment ­– of a dark January night – when he stopped worrying about writer’s block and began to write

When I was in my twenties, my urge to write was very strong. I was driven, almost consumed, by this ever-present zeal, which tore me apart nearly as inexorably and effectively as love did. But I wrote precious little. Now, some twenty years later, I have a general idea about the traps I so unknowingly walked into. More…

Brainstorm

Issue 3/2007 | Archives online, Essays, On writing and not writing

Writer's block

The poet Jouni Inkala finds the words-to-be of his slowly forming poems unbribable

My little fingertip, the size of
a crocodile brain, and a turpentine-taste
on my palate monitor this moment
on the unoxygenated
planet of weariness.
One will be baptised – spray paint
suddenly swishing its message
in my brains – as often in my life,
with something darker than water
freezing in the font, and I'll recall
it's actually a donkey's-years-old
message from my own stanzas.  More...

Telling the tale

Issue 2/2007 | Archives online, Essays, On writing and not writing

Writer's block

Half of the art of writing lies in not telling the reader everything, writes Kaari Utrio, historian and writer of historical fiction

Fantasy is a curse to science but the lifeblood of literature. The combination of these two opposing factors lies at the core of my work. In the expression, ‘historical novel’, the emphasis is on the word ‘novel’. To me a novel is a story, and I am a storyteller. This is an important basic definition for the genre of literature I write. More…

Subterranean, pre-verbal

Issue 1/2007 | Archives online, Essays, On writing and not writing

Writer's block

Claes Andersson, poet and psychiatrist, ponders the difficulties of writing, and how to get down to it. These are extracts from the collection of articles, Luova mieli. Kirjoittamisen vimma ja vastus (‘The creative mind. The rage and burden of writing’, Kirjapaja, 2002)

Some subjects or ideas need years on the back burner before they submit to being written about. The wise writer learns the basic rule ofthe good midwife: don’t panic, don’t force, wait, and help when the time for birth is at hand, but know also when a Caesarean section is advisable or even necessary. More…

On the uselessness of poetry

Issue 3/2002 | Archives online, Authors, Essays

Poetry has become a habit, or a dependency, a bit like a long marriage, or the habit of doing the football pools, or of getting involved in jazz.

I began my career as a writer in the autumn of 1962 with a slim volume of poetry, Ventil (‘Valve’). Ever since then I have written and read poetry continuously. Over a period of forty years I have published about twenty collections.

Since for most of that time I have also had other jobs, either as a psychiatrist or as a politician (from 1987 to 1999 I was a member of Parliament, from 1990 to 1998 leader of the newly founded Vasemmistoliitto [Left Alliance] and from 1995 to 1999 Minister of Culture in Paavo Lipponen’s five-party government), my writing of poems has often been concentrated on summer holidays and weekends. So it’s often summer in my poems. More…

Enough is enough!

Issue 4/2001 | Archives online, Authors, Essays

Katri Vala’s admirers regarded her as a kind of priestess of passion for life. A hundred years after her birth, the contemporary writer Leena Krohn begs to differ

I have in my life been inspired by many poets – Salvatore Quasimodo, Charles Baudelaire, Nils Ferlin, T.S. Eliot, Edgar Lee Masters, Rainer Maria Rilke, for example.

Eino Leino, Uuno Kailas, P. Mustapää and Saima Harmaja are among the idols of my childhood, Edith Södergran and Helvi Juvonen those of my youth. Their verses must have formed such firm structures in my brain that I would be able to mumble them even if I were to become a victim of Alzheimer’s disease.

Katri Vala has never been one of these poets. More…

Ecstasy and silence

Issue 2/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Essays, Reviews

Peter Mickwitz surveys new Finnish poetry in Finnish and Swedish

Considering all the talk about poetry’s ‘critical situation’ and its ‘marginal­ization,’ it is surprising to see how much poetry is being published in Finland, both in Finnish and Swedish. No less surprising is the fact that so much of it is excellent. Thus, it is not a difficult but a gratifying task to pick four poetry books published in 1999 for brief comment.

Ralf Andtbacka (born 1963), connois­seur and translator of Anglophone po­etry –  but first and foremost a Finland­-Swedish poet – published his third collection of poems, Cafe Sjöjungfrun (,The Mermaid Cafe’, Söderströms, 1999), which was nominated for the Runeberg Prize in the fall of 1999. The first poem in the book, ‘Cesur’ (‘Caesura’), takes place in ‘the first evening of autumn / even though it is still July’ which reminds this reader, somewhat unexpectedly, of Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem ‘Eufori’ (‘Euphoria’), in which the poet’s alter ego sits in his garden at dusk and feels an intense connection to all there is. Andtbacka’s poem is less intense, more distanced, but the presence of things is as strong as in Ekelöf. While Ekelöf writes ‘as if this were the last evening before a long long journey,’ Andtbacka’s anticipation is of another kind, it describes a poetics: ‘a vacuum that waits to be filled / by something as inescapable / as our quiet conversation, here / and now, small demarcations / and corrections, openings / and dead ends, pauses.’ More…

Afterthought

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Essays, Non-fiction

From Novellit (‘The Short stories’, Otava 1985). Interview by Maija Alftan

The short story is a matter of expectancy and reception. So it has to offer surprises. It has to reward the waiting.

The surprises are caused by the known and the familiar. Often some mis­hap is needed; the most crucial can be some social fix. The story’s limited space provides three states, brought about by a change in the environment: the past, the future and the passing moment. They create a special, unique phase of life for one of the characters. A return to the past leads to the new – not to the previous, situation – and this isn’t in anyone’s control. Short stories often contain arbitrariness. More…

A passion for darkness

Issue 4/1997 | Archives online, Authors, Essays

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

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

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

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

Winged fever

Issue 4/1996 | Archives online, Authors, Essays

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

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

Life is elsewhere, but you can get there by taxi

Issue 2/1996 | Archives online, Authors, Essays, Interviews

Jari Tervo interviews himself, avoiding the subject of his new novel, Pyhiesi yhteyteen (‘Numbered among your saints’)

These light mornings, the writer Jari Tervo bubbles over with springtime after he has written a page or two of his new book and is getting ready to walk to the Thirsty Camel to enjoy a pub quiz, alongside about two pints of well-brewed beer. The birds have come back like boomerangs.

On his way to the shadow of the beer­tap, some people greet him, others stare shyly. The shy starers remind him of the television quiz. Those who do not pay any attention to him are thoroughly acquainted with his work. Tervo has written a Rovaniemi sequence – three novels, a collection of short stories and a collection of poetry – about his home town. Rovaniemi, located on the Arctic Circle, is, for these southerly citizens of Espoo [next to Helsinki], as exotic, remote and startling a place as Haiti, but snowier. More…

Invisible cities

Issue 4/1992 | Archives online, Essays

Extracts from Leena Krohn’s collection of essays, Rapina ja muita papereita (‘Rustle, and other papers’, WSOY, 1989).

Past me hurries a man in a rustling anorak. He pushes a card into a crack in the wall. There is a whirring noise, a door opens and, shoulder first, he pushes his way into a cramped room. At eye-level is a black screen, and under it a group of buttons. On the buttons is printed: Cash. Statement. Balance. On an empty button someone has written: Holdup. A question appears on the screen, and deserves our undivided attention: Do you wish to continue with another transaction?

We do! We certainly do. The mild warmth that suffuses the automatic bank pleases me, too. Why shouldn’t it? The warmth of the machine, the heat of money, is itself one of the forms of human energy secreted by the city, however stunted and primitive it may seem as it oozes from the depths of the metal cabinet. More…