Runous muistuttaa maalausta | Ut pictura poesis

Poetry resembles painting. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over.
—Horace

Jenni Quilter (The New School for Public Engagement) considers the Poetry Foundation’s current exhibition, Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets. Quilter's discussion will explore Freilicher's friendships with poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. The event will feature a virtual tour of other collaborations among painters and poets of the New York School, and a discussion of the relationship between image and text. Quilter will touch on the possibilities that images hold for the poet, the cop-out of “illustration,” and the history of livre d’artiste. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A moderated by David Getsy (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and a reception.

Friday, Feb 21, 6:00PM
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free Admission

Runopaadesta Runebergin päivänä | Poemstone

"Runopaasi", Tervon hautausmaa, kuva: Partanen & Lamusuo, 2006.

"Vanhempieni hautakiveen oli vaikea sovittaa muita kuin yksinkertaisia ja selkeästi tulkittavia merkkejä. Runopaaden neljä sivua, neljä kivitaulua, ahdistivat, kehys oli tiukka ja kirjaimet painavia kuin papin nuotti. Ennen oli helppo tuhlata paperia, vaan raavipa samat bitit mustaan graniittiin ‒ tosin en minä niitä raapinutkaan, vaan Kaavin Kiven tietokone. Lopulta luotin kokeilussani kokemusperäiseen luontooni: kiveen, puuhun, maahan ja veteen. Kuoleman syntysanoina kokeilin Paavo Haavikon jäyhiä salasanoja: ”Kirjoita lyhyesti myös silloin kun tekstiäsi ei hakata kiveen.” Joka sanan piti pitää paikkaansa eli puhua sen verran kuin rauniokivi, kun siihen lyö varpaansa. Kaavin Kiveä varten Heikki Lamusuo taitteli Runopaadesta paperisen pienoismallin, johon Jaana Partasen kynä taiteili eri puolilta metsästämäni salasanat. Kun paperikiveä käänteli käsissään, kiertäen Runopaatta vasemmalta oikealle, neljään tolpan kulmaan syntyi uusia säkeitä. Niin niitä kasvaa myös Tervon hautausmaalla."

(TÄHTIVIERAILIJA Jouni Tossavainen: Runopaasista Runebergin päivänä.)

It was only possible to fit simple and easily interpretable signs on my parents’ gravestone. The four sides of the Poemstone, four stone plates, were haunting, the frame was constricted and the letters heavy as a priest’s tone. Earlier it was easy to waste paper, but to scratch the same bits into black granite ‒ although it wasn’t I who scratched them, but the computer of Kaavin Kivi. In the end, I trusted my empirical nature in my experiment: stone, wood, earth and water. As the birth words of death I tried Paavo Haavikko’s weighty advice: ”Write succinctly even when your text is not carved in stone.” Each word had to be veracious, to speak as much as a stone of a ruin, when you hit your toe against it. For Kaavin Kivi, Heikki Lamusuo folded a paper scale model on which Jaana Partanen’s pen drew the keywords I had hunted from here and there. When you turned the paper stone in your hands, circling the Poemstone from left to right, new verses were created in the four corners of the post. So they also grow at the Tervo graveyard. Jouni Tossavainen, poet and author