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“ambiguity”, “simplicity”, “the everyday” and a view of poetry that was characterised by
“internal tension”. After the collapse of the bound forms within literature there was a
keen and widespread interest in alternative and more open forms, such as the Chinese
and Japanese simple, concentrated and at the same time multifaceted forms of expression.
It is possible to single out poets such as Gunnar Björling, Rabbe Enckell, Solveig von
Schoultz, Tuomas Anhava, Paavo Haavikko, Paal-Helge Haugen, Tomas Tranströmer,
Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams and find connections, not least
in the emphasis given to concrete and everyday things. These writers all write in a great
modernistic tradition where everyone is related to each other and speaks variants of one
and the same language.
In the name of openness Carpelan presents those who are “different” – children, the
eccentric, the psychologically ill, authors and artists. These have an essential ability that
adults and people blinded by their daily routines lack: they can see. Sight and sensuality
create, for the most part, a complement to and a force against a life view that is onesidedly
inclined to reason, and to abstract, unambiguous knowledge and rational
thoughts. To paraphrase the Zen Buddhist simile concerning learning to see a tree, a
mountain and water that Carpelan returns to time after time one can say that “the man
who knows” must learn from the “the man who knows nothing”. Herein lies a paradox:
“the man who knows nothing”, for example, the child, is in the end the one who knows.
This dream of an immediate relationship with the surrounding world illustrates an idea
typical of the period and a utopian vision. What the vision illustrates is that Carpelan
wishes to build a bridge over the rift between language and concrete, perceived things.
If there is a hidden argumentation in Carpelan’s descriptions of surroundings, it is
based on an ambition to concentrate on the seen, to sharpen the reader’s senses, to take
the reader on an adventure in a reality that sometimes expands towards the microscopic,
the detailed and the nuanced and sometimes expands out into the immense, the fantastic
the dreamlike and the visionary. Both optical directions – the centrifugal and centripetal –
share a common feature: they extend and expand a habitual and common understanding
of reality. In a world where the starting point is that people cannot see, everything that
can be recorded – even the smallest detail – has a value, since it breaks a habitual pattern.
For reality to keep its attraction so that man’s fascination with the small details is kept
alive, reality must appear to be undiscovered. There are good reasons why Carpelan, on
several occasions, speaks about authors making things visible and shaping reality, and of
the poet as a cartographer or seismographer. Against a background of such an agenda,
every text, in principle, seems like an attempt to repeatedly re-discover and re-experience
the everyday and familiar, since they constantly threaten to disappear out of view. The
endeavour to reach the uttermost accuracy and precision appears to be a means of getting
away from the everyday routines of language.
In accordance with his poetics, Carpelan from the beginning of the 1960s, places
science and ideology in a critical light. Art, poetry, fantasy, dreams, sensuality make life
meaningful. This division shows how Carpelan in his writings elucidates a position in an
intellectual landscape where modernity and science, art and life, thought and feeling,
common sense and fantasy are difficult to unite. Science seeks to classify and explain the
nature of reality. Poetry strives to shape, make visible and protect the unexplainable.
What Carpelan does is to fit the unexplainable into a framework that is familiar to us all,
namely the simple and concrete architecture in which we live. This simultaneous
disbelief/belief brings with it a number of tendencies in Carpelan’s writings: from
thought to the sensual, from the abstract to the concrete, from words to images and from
time to space.
The emphasis on space/ the room crystallizes during the 1960s, the decade Kjell
Espmark has called the “time of simplicity”. Carpelan at this point first of all divested
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