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Out of curiosity, I began to wonder if any similarities might exist between my p o e t r y a n d F i n n i s h contemporary poetry. After all, my grandparents had immigrated from Finland and I grew up listening to the language. We shared the same ancestral root, and the landscape I live, in northern Minnesota, echoes the landscape of Finland. I was going to Finland anyway to visit my grandparents’ birthplace, and so I looked for poet or writer in Helsinki to have a conversation. Eric Hieta, an American teaching at the University of Turku, helped: a few days before my flight, I received an email from Tiina Pystynen, a writer and graphic artist born in Finland in 1955. Since 1987, she has published novels, non-fiction, illustrated poems and autobiographical graphic novels for adults. Her writing is sensual and explores female experiences of love, motherhood, and sexuality. In Finland, her work is appreciated for both its comedy and poetry. Among her works (I’ve translated the titles from Finnish) is Memoir of the Queen of Widows, an autobiographical picture book for adults about the life of a family after a father’s suicide. She is also the author of A Lonely Woman’s Love Stories, about a lonely woman’s love life, and The Cage of Shame, about the process of psychotherapy from a patient’s point of view. Dances of Love and Desire, her latest book published by WSOY in Finland, is a fascinating exploration of great visual artists’ erotic work, pornography, and female sexual experience. She has created a visual dialogue to portray the emotional landscape of sexuality with honesty and humor. 22 I didn’t know her; she didn’t know me. She is a mother and a grandmother, and she wrote about female experience, and about love and desire. Calyx Press Duluth had recently published my book of poems, The Mother Tongue, that explores coming of age, women’s sexuality, and how one’s relationship with one’s mother influences both. We immediately recognized the similar themes. We met in Helsinki and talked as we walked through the Akateeminen Kirjakauppa, the Academic Bookstore, and then on to the Kiasma gallery. We have differences, of course. She has far more publications. She is heterosexual. She and I have worked with people with mental illness. She had been an occupational therapist and I am a social worker. She uses drawings in her work and creates graphic novels and illustrates her poems. She is interested in family life, love, sexuality, and the diary form. Her work has not been translated to English, but the illustrations are easily accessible. In dialogue, we explored our experience as women writing about sexuality. Talking Back “When I started to study drawing, copying Old Masters in art museums and libraries, I found erotic art from the Stone Age to contemporary times. How strange the things that lovers do in the darkness of night and how ridiculous. I was fascinated by the thought of a feminine answer to masculine pornography. I wanted to make something that would please me as a woman,” Pystynen said. We agreed that women seem to have a different experience with erotica or pornography. Females are often the object of desire (or exploitation), and women who write about sexuality must contend with assumptions and stereotypes. The fundamental purpose shifts, in my opinion, because women are not after mere sensation. We are after a full connection with the emotional landscape. The erotic, for women, seems to begin with talking and dialogue. And dialogue that begins in honesty. I asked her if she thought pornography was offensive to women. It’s long been a matter of public debate and many women find it demeaning. I myself considered it to be exploitive. The models seemed too young. But Pystynen examined cultural images, visual art, with her own fascinating spare colored pencil drawings. The human figures are nude and imperfect, they are awkward with each other, genitals aren’t always connected to the body. “In pornography, the human being is replaced by an orifice,” she said. “Everyone has to define her or his attitude toward sexuality. How can we do it without anything to compare our experience to?” “Pornography is not the best way to do it but the softer, erotic work tended to romanticize too much,” she said. It presented “beautiful people making love in candle light on sheets of silk with sweet music in the background. It was not realistic and it makes one feel envious. Making love doesn’t look beautiful to me...it looks ugly and ridiculous.” Tiina decided to make her own images. “I understood that drawings or prints could be a wonderful alternative to the flat and dull commercial pornography, just as it used to be in the 18th century. My illustrations, the graphics and drawings in the book, are my own versions of the great masters, mainly men. I copied Old Master’s erotic images, modified them more or less for myself and the characters from art history talk together about the everyday pleasures and problems of modern lovers.” No surprise really, that the erotic for women starts with talking. Pornography and Erotic Justice Obviously, pornography has always been one of the features of human expression. Crossing Borders: A Dialogue Between a Finnish and and an American Writer by Sheila Packa, © Sheila Packa, 2009 Sheila Packa, left; Tiina Pystynen, right Pystynen demonstrates her feminist sensibilities by taking it on as a subject. In her book, her dialogue is incisive, humorous and compassionate. Pystynen said that our culture doesn’t yet have the words for women’s sexual experience. The words that we use to describe genitals are perjorative and actually don’t convey what we need to convey. “Art and literature should process our bodily experiences,” she suggested. She cites her literary influences, Virginia Woolf and William Blake. What drives her writing is the need to explore the difference between what we are expected to feel and what we actually feel. “I wanted to show in these pornographic images my own experience of embarrassment, timidity, shame and fear along with lust, love, joy and closeness.” She has a commitment to honesty and to sharing her own experience. Personal experience was something she engaged with a deeply artistic intensity. Women, and men as well, enter adulthood with very little knowledge or experience with one’s own sexuality. One is confronted with, and sometimes bombarded with, the images of others. Yet we keep so much silence around it out of shame or confusion or secrecy. In metaphor and in all writing, isn’t it time that women started to claim their own experience and emotion? Audre Lorde, a black feminist poet, wrote an essay about the “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” that talked about the strengthening effect of women claiming their own sexuality. “Pornography is not meant to be taken literally!” Pystynen said. In her work, she takes the pornographic and makes it figurative in her amusing drawings. She wasn’t exploiting anybody. In this situation, one puts aside the concern about how the pornography was made. My book’s midsection was the “Torrent,” a collection of erotic poems. The poems had emerged at the age of 50, between an intersection of falling in love and exploring a visual art exhibit of lesbian pornography that had become a collection of postcards, Drawing the Line from the Canadian artists collective Kiss & Tell: Susan Stewart, Persimmon Blackbridge, and Lizard Jones. The exhibition of photographs, toured Canada, the United States, and Australia in 1988. Kiss and Tell asked viewers to write comments on the walls alongside the images (men wrote theirs in a book in the center of the gallery), and these comments were then published with a selection of the photographs in a pull-out postcard book. Poetry that is written in response to visual art is called ekphrastic. Many poets have used visual art as a source. I myself began writing this particular erotica as an exercise in writing ekphrastic poems but the poems themselves shifted in both image and intent. It was erotic, but about love and art, and it was set in the context of a life, within a family, a community. Of course, pornography is fantasy. Projecting fantasies on others is admittedly complicated. In my writing, the photographs I found explored the full range of experience, from cuddling and kissing to bondage and sadomasochism. The latter of course with its association with violence has many repercussions; I know it especially from my social work that boundary violations have emotional consequences for women. Some find the more extreme sexual activity simply playacting, and some find it abusive. Some people take things too far. Some people get emotional and physical wounds that change their life. The work represented the entire milieu of experience that young women enter in life. I recalled one reader exclaimed that some of my poems seemed so intensely personal; she was uncomfortable with the lack of privacy. As readers we sometimes forget the distance between the work of art, the made object, and the artist. The poems actually were not necessarily detailing any of my personal experience. All good poetry is connected to the body. Writing the poems had taught me that the erotic could make good metaphor. The ecstatic poet Rumi combined the erotic with the divine. Some of the poems from my book were featured in a collaborative exhibit with printmakers at the Northern Prints Gallery show, “Erotic Justice.” Erotic justice is a phrase used by Hildegaard of Bingen and recently, Matthew Fox, author of Creation Spirituality and it offers a vision of wholeness, an integration of the erotic into all aspects of life. Art and Fear Tiina and I talked about concerns that we had each had about making the work public, or the fears that her mother or husband had at the publication and the visual art exhibit of her original drawings. It isn’t so much about personal disclosure as about perceptions of others. Maybe as women our early conditioning from childhood to please others is an obstacle that must be overcome. “To be good” takes on a different meaning at this point, as artists, as adults. Artists and writers might stir up controversy – we don’t always know what will do that — or the work might be met with silence. Our walk had taken us to the modernist museum and gallery, Kiasma. We went to the featured exhibit, a video installation by Pipilotti Rist, “Elixir.” We viewed a huge screen (broadcast against 2 walls and the ceiling) of the passionate playfulness of a nude woman with water, saliva, menstrual blood, vaginal secretions, smashing over-ripe papaya, biting an apple. A small wild boar entered the scene on the video, eating an Dialogue Between Writers continued on the next page NEW WORLD FINN TAMMIKUU - HELMIKUU - MAALISKUU • 2009 TALVI
Willie Lahti: 3 Poems from the Past Several moments between treeline and hayfield drifting clouds. summer wind across hayfield. clover in bloom. rusty barbwire. grey cedar fenceposts older than me. aspen leaves shimmer yellow to green to yellow. sluggish creek water. beaver pond. bare feet on gravel road. barn swallows cut graceful arcs through cobalt sky. fields a perfect green. silvery aspen bark. beaverwater brown. minnows mark circles on the surface. filing the teeth on my chainsaw. early april. ground still frozen. chickadees haven’t yet gone north. last fall’s dead leaves still on ground. stand of aspen. timberjay on tractor fender. dead dry timothy. clearing to the east. aspen bark. beaver pond. muddy water. minnows mark the surface after work thursday 2 in the morning early perseid is sending silver horsehair streaks up there above oak leaves of minnehaha creek me and jake just off work couple girls and a 12 pack to keep us company we stumble & laugh through the dark of summer. Cassandra wants to marry Robert Redford. “It’s a secret” she whispers. Ma gone to heaven twenty years ago. Dad is retired near Lake Harriet. Two sisters married. Brother died of a brain tumor. “You’ll never die of a brain tumor” she says to Roger. He’ll never be Robert Redford either Dialogue Between Writers continued from previous page All Poems above ©Willi Lahti apple. The audience lay on pillows on the floor viewing the extravagant images. In the next room, through white sheer curtains, was a silent video projected on a suspended sculpture of the quarter moon. It was very beautiful, and it took a few moments of examining it to realize that the images were of aroused female genitalia. Here was a female artist exploring a similar topic, writ large. Is there a danger of putting the work out there? Is there an apple, that if bitten, causes one to be evicted from paradise? Is there a Pandora’s box that once opened, can never be closed? Is there a line that we should draw? No. One must trust the artistic process. I don’t think that as an artist I can step back from the material. Usually, artists and writers would say that you don’t choose your material; it chooses you. Artistic work requires a passionate engagement and a deep exploration. I think that good art does ‘break something open’ in the sense that we are changed by the experience of it, that we see anew and think differently because of it. I look for a transformation, a new knowledge and experience. Tiina Pystynen, despite the concerns of her family, let her work be published. Trying to please everybody would not be good for her work. There is a larger consideration than individual feelings and that is a commitment to honesty and to the art. Next door, at the Ateneum Museum, the National Art Gallery featured a large exhibit of work by the artist Picasso. Here is an artist that explored all mediums and crossed all boundaries. The exposure to these artists is expansive, freeing. As a poet, I am interested in objects of beauty. It’s purely subjective, of course. Beauty Left to right: Henrik Nyholm, Markku Korhonen, and Janna Lintula “A Marvelous Feeling” Finnish Demonstrators at Copenhagen Copenhagen – Janna Lintula, 20, of Helsinki, danced for joy in the midst of a crowd of demonstrators in the center of Copenhagen on Saturday morning, December 12. “It was just this that got me to come here,” she acclaimed as she looked at the flood of people with sparkling eyes. Lintula and a couple of hundred other Finns came to the Copenhagen demonstrations to show that youth are concerned over climate change and want to make a difference. The goal is to pressure world leaders gathered at the climate conference for fast action in slowing down climate change. “We are here to increase the pressure,” said Henrik Nyholm, 22, of Helsinki. The possibility of making an impact was also emphasized by Markku Korhonen, 22, and Hannu Koski, 22, also of Helsinki. Organized by the environmental organization Friends of the Earth, the outpouring of people from around the world to Copenhagen marked the beginning of the demonstration. Thousands of demonstrators in blue raincoasts poured into Government Square on Saturday morning. In the afternoon march, organizers claimed up to 100,000 participants. Police estimates were 50,000. In the middle of the crowd, a large white bedsheet appeared. condemning the activities of Finnish timber concerns in South America. Thus, Finland’s Left Alliance youth brought their objections to the climate conference. English translation from online Helsingin Sanomat by H. Siitonen, original article by Heli Saavalainen (Another concern of protestors is “Fake Forests”: Forests soak up warming gases and store them away from the atmosphere, so countries get credit under the new proposed system for preserving them. It is an essential measure to stop global warming. But the Canadian, Swedish and Finnish logging companies have successfully pressured their governments into inserting an absurd clause into the rules. The new rules say you can, in the name of “sustainable forest management”, cut down almost all the trees – without losing credits. It’s Kafkaesque: a felled forest doesn’t increase your official emissions... even though it increases your actual emissions. Source: Johann Hari, The Independent, December 11, 2009.) always has something unfamiliar or unusual in it, beauty is arresting, beauty draws you to itself, it gives you a gift. You can bask in it, experience bliss, feel the sublime. We ended our day at the Cafe Ekberg, with tea and champagne rolls. I asked her what her goal was in her writing. “I would like to make it easier to be a woman,” she answered. And the next project? Something about the muse. Notes: Pystynen, Tiina. Lemmentanssit: Raukkautta Ihminen Rakastaa. Werner Soderstom Ojakeyhtio, Helsinki, c2009. Packa, Sheila. The Mother Tongue. Calyx Press Duluth, c2007. Sheila Packa is a poet and social worker who lives in the Duluth, Minnesota, area. She has a new project ready, a chapbook and audio CD with cello music. ECHO AND LIGHTNING is a chapbook of about rapture. The poems are a song of ascension, a single story of winged migration. More information can be found on her website. Renew Your Subscription To New World Finn Today Use the Form on Page 15 JANUARY - FEBRUARY - MARCH • 2010 WINTER NEW WORLD FINN 23
Page 1 and 2: EXPLORING FINNISH CULTURE New World
Page 3 and 4: Independence Day Greetings From Pre
Page 5 and 6: Finnish Tapas Comes to Duluth Text
Page 7 and 8: the shore as the Moon began to shin
Page 9 and 10: Poijat Celebrates Twenty Years of P
Page 11 and 12: So this day finally dawned for me,
Page 13 and 14: Kotinurkka - The Corner of the Home
Page 15 and 16: Name Street/Address The Journey Ahe
Page 17 and 18: Donna Salli’s Play About Finnish-
Page 19 and 20: A View From Finland with Enrique Te
Page 21: Finn Hall Named Finlandia Foundatio
Page 25 and 26: Lumi ja Kaamos Outside the snow fel
Page 27 and 28: New World Finn Bookstore Your sourc

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