The Aviary: What is the first landscape that you remember?
I think it was a cornfield, in Autumn or Summertime, in the evening. A Finnish corn field, not so large or horizontally open like the Russian farmland, but flourishing patchwork: half-glimmering and gilded, half-shadowed and fringed with coniferous forest.
The Aviary: Has this changed from the landscape that you live in now?
I live nowadays in a place which neighbours my home farm, where my sister now lives. The landscape is basically the same. It is very rural. There has not been any dramatic changes, but there are less forests than before.
The Aviary: What was your first exposure to poetry?
In the small village where I grew up, there was a small school were my father studied. His early schoolteacher was the Finnish novelist and poet, Viljo Saraja (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viljo_Saraja). My father did not have a good relationship with him, so he had a negative picture of poetry, and literature in general from an early age. Because of Saraja, he not was able to let go of those first preconceptions, so our home was not literally oriented at all.
My parents were simple farmers. The poetry that emerged from this environment was the type described by Virgil in his Georgics. When I was at school, age ten or so, I wrote rhymes and short comic epigrams of other pupils, without any formal rules, just playing with language. My teacher at that time noticed this and gave me a nice writing exercise book as a birthday present. After some consideration I decided to write a detective story. Soon this filled the entire book. But after a while, when I read it, I found the story rather inelegant. I decided to erase it word by word with a rubber eraser. The exercise book, I thought, was beautiful and deserved better.
After this I had a few years of writer’s block. At the age of 15 or 16 I heard an old recorded poetry reading of the Finnish modernist and word-magician Lauri Viita (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauri_Viita), who actually spent his last years in Oitti, in the same small village where I was in school at that time. Viita’s poems made a strong impression on me then, as they still do now.
The Aviary: Describe your writing process.
There are always many parallel and simultaneous processes. Experience has shown me that each process strongly depends on purpose. But there is some kind of core method, which is common for each independent process. Some processes are short and some are long, but the core processes are never-ending.
An example of this never-ending process is a project called “Poetic Encyclopedia”, which is a collective work I have been working on with two other writers over the past ten years. It’s a cyclic alphabetic form of writing fiction. It has been published only in short excerpts. The project has taught us a great deal about the psychodynamics of working in a group. The responsibility of making one’s own poetic ideas objective in contrast to the ideas of the other individuals of the group has been the main principle for us. When the work of art from this collective process is then outputted and published, it will again become subjective. The subject of the work is the group. (I recently became acquainted with the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._I._Gurdjieff), an Armenian-Greek mystic, a teacher of sacred dances and a spiritual teacher, who wrote about the very detailed systematic description of this process.) At the same time PE is a development platform for other more limited forms. It is kind of hypertext, in which it is possible to use to organize ad hoc texts in any purpose.
My first poetry collection has been assembled in a similar way. The basis for every text has been part of larger hypertext published in an internet blog. First I filtered out from the blog certain types of texts (aka Web search engine–based sketches). I saved them in one file and took them as a collection of ideas with some raw material. Of course at this point I already had some intuition of what the outcome would be. First I analyzed what I had unsystematically & half-intuitively assembled, and how these things worked together, and concluded whether or not they had potential to grow into some kind of satisfying form of literature.
The Aviary: What writers are you reading right now?
1. Nonnus: Dionysiaca.
2. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa: Of Occult Philosophy.
3. Leonhard Euler: Kirjeitä saksalaiselle prinsessalle fysiikasta ja filosofiasta (Letters on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy Addressed to a German Princess).
4. Marcel Proust: Kadonnutta aikaa etsimässä (Remembrance of Things Past).
5. Johannes Anker Larsen: Viisasten kivi (The Philosopher’s Stone).
6. Aleksei Tolstoy: Kärsimysten tie (The Road to Calvary, a trilogy).
7. G. I. Gurdjieff: Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
8. P. D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way
9. Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
10. Mathews, Harry & Brotchie, Alastair. Oulipo compendium.
The Aviary: Can you explain how you write your Google poems?
My ideas of Internet search engine poems, first published in 2002, are based on grammatical forms of the Finnish language. In the Finnish language there are no prepositions. Everything is included in the word itself.
Let’s take the most simple example. We could use the concept of allomorph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allomorph), which is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme). For example, the word ”istui”, (he/she sat down), is a combination of two allomorphs, which are represented in string of allophones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone) ”istu” and in allophone ”i”. ”Istu” is a body of a verb, which indicates the ’vertical-horizontal position’, and ”i” is a sign of a preterit form, which in the grammatical tense expresses actions which took place in the past. There is actually an invisible allomorph in the word, a so-called zero morph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_(linguistics)). This expresses that the subject of the process (he/she) is a third part, not a part of the actual communication. In the Finnish language, one could produce dozens of long strings of allophones based on the body of one verb. Just by modifying the body of the word one can produce an large number of contextual viewpoints where one can use a particular verb. The body of the word itself strongly limits the way you can use it.
On the contrary, working from a database (for me the Internet is just one kind of database) by using certain forms of verbs you can discover specific contextual aspects. Therefore it can be predicted that these contents will be strongly related, because the same form of the verb has used. My first search engine-based experiments were based on this observation. So at the beginning, my aim was not directly related to FLARF; it has more in common with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poetry.
All of my search engine-based texts contain a basic idea. It is an idealistic form of art. The idea could be some type of observation, hidden statement or hypothesis, which the text tries to prove. The hypothesis could be related to language itself (“I believe this works this way”) or it could be more akin to a sociological root (“A number of people say this, and at same time they say this; I believe there is some kind of hidden contradiction in their mindset or philosophy.”) Or it could be just a flow of inspiration, a type of free association improvisation or automatic writing, which leads to some satisfying results.
One property of collage-based writing, based on the Internet, is that it clearly expresses some kind of sociological or political nature. Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who wrote influential works of literary and rhetorical theory and criticism. He wanted to construct a ”objective psychology” which could effectively and clearly show contradictions of motives in an individual’s mind, or in pair of two individuals, or in Society as a whole. For Bakhtin, verbal discourse was a product of the communion between the speaker and the social situation. Freud talked about denying the unconscious mind as a mechanism, but Bakhtin asked: Could any “mechanism” make such refined logical, ethical, and aesthetic decisions? This kind of “mechanism” should be something else, something which is not included in a world of physical nature, but in a world of ideologies. The concept of the unconscious mind is not for Bakhtin a objective scientific phenomena, but a proof of the mind’s hidden chain of ideology.
Therefore, the Internet has not only broadened public speech discourses which are intended to be literal, it has widened all types of communication with all possible intentions. And this is the real key of the ”objective psychology”. Some can argue: “Why should we make this zero-research? We already know the answer: banality!” This is what I say: There are many things we know we don’t know, or we even don’t know we don’t know. Let’s leave the poetry to the big questions, which automatically avoid the trap of banality.
For the first time we can, by using Internet search-methods, discover what different ages, nationalities, and social classes really think, not only what statistics show or how they answer to polls. We are searching the unconscious mind, not the conscious one. It is more question of how things are repeated, not how they actually are.
The Aviary: What is your favourite place to visit?
Russia.
The Aviary: Why?
Russia is an absolutely contradictory country to Finland. I call the railway from Helsinki to St. Petesrburg “The Psychedelic Tunnel.” It goes from West to East. For me St. Petersburg is more “east” than China. The main thing is that the metaphysical ground is different in Russia than in western Europe. These grounds are exclusionary to each other. In SPb I face the light, which is different.
I think it was a cornfield, in Autumn or Summertime, in the evening. A Finnish corn field, not so large or horizontally open like the Russian farmland, but flourishing patchwork: half-glimmering and gilded, half-shadowed and fringed with coniferous forest.
The Aviary: Has this changed from the landscape that you live in now?
I live nowadays in a place which neighbours my home farm, where my sister now lives. The landscape is basically the same. It is very rural. There has not been any dramatic changes, but there are less forests than before.
The Aviary: What was your first exposure to poetry?
In the small village where I grew up, there was a small school were my father studied. His early schoolteacher was the Finnish novelist and poet, Viljo Saraja (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viljo_Saraja). My father did not have a good relationship with him, so he had a negative picture of poetry, and literature in general from an early age. Because of Saraja, he not was able to let go of those first preconceptions, so our home was not literally oriented at all.
My parents were simple farmers. The poetry that emerged from this environment was the type described by Virgil in his Georgics. When I was at school, age ten or so, I wrote rhymes and short comic epigrams of other pupils, without any formal rules, just playing with language. My teacher at that time noticed this and gave me a nice writing exercise book as a birthday present. After some consideration I decided to write a detective story. Soon this filled the entire book. But after a while, when I read it, I found the story rather inelegant. I decided to erase it word by word with a rubber eraser. The exercise book, I thought, was beautiful and deserved better.
After this I had a few years of writer’s block. At the age of 15 or 16 I heard an old recorded poetry reading of the Finnish modernist and word-magician Lauri Viita (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauri_Viita), who actually spent his last years in Oitti, in the same small village where I was in school at that time. Viita’s poems made a strong impression on me then, as they still do now.
The Aviary: Describe your writing process.
There are always many parallel and simultaneous processes. Experience has shown me that each process strongly depends on purpose. But there is some kind of core method, which is common for each independent process. Some processes are short and some are long, but the core processes are never-ending.
An example of this never-ending process is a project called “Poetic Encyclopedia”, which is a collective work I have been working on with two other writers over the past ten years. It’s a cyclic alphabetic form of writing fiction. It has been published only in short excerpts. The project has taught us a great deal about the psychodynamics of working in a group. The responsibility of making one’s own poetic ideas objective in contrast to the ideas of the other individuals of the group has been the main principle for us. When the work of art from this collective process is then outputted and published, it will again become subjective. The subject of the work is the group. (I recently became acquainted with the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._I._Gurdjieff), an Armenian-Greek mystic, a teacher of sacred dances and a spiritual teacher, who wrote about the very detailed systematic description of this process.) At the same time PE is a development platform for other more limited forms. It is kind of hypertext, in which it is possible to use to organize ad hoc texts in any purpose.
My first poetry collection has been assembled in a similar way. The basis for every text has been part of larger hypertext published in an internet blog. First I filtered out from the blog certain types of texts (aka Web search engine–based sketches). I saved them in one file and took them as a collection of ideas with some raw material. Of course at this point I already had some intuition of what the outcome would be. First I analyzed what I had unsystematically & half-intuitively assembled, and how these things worked together, and concluded whether or not they had potential to grow into some kind of satisfying form of literature.
The Aviary: What writers are you reading right now?
1. Nonnus: Dionysiaca.
2. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa: Of Occult Philosophy.
3. Leonhard Euler: Kirjeitä saksalaiselle prinsessalle fysiikasta ja filosofiasta (Letters on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy Addressed to a German Princess).
4. Marcel Proust: Kadonnutta aikaa etsimässä (Remembrance of Things Past).
5. Johannes Anker Larsen: Viisasten kivi (The Philosopher’s Stone).
6. Aleksei Tolstoy: Kärsimysten tie (The Road to Calvary, a trilogy).
7. G. I. Gurdjieff: Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
8. P. D. Ouspensky: The Fourth Way
9. Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
10. Mathews, Harry & Brotchie, Alastair. Oulipo compendium.
The Aviary: Can you explain how you write your Google poems?
My ideas of Internet search engine poems, first published in 2002, are based on grammatical forms of the Finnish language. In the Finnish language there are no prepositions. Everything is included in the word itself.
Let’s take the most simple example. We could use the concept of allomorph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allomorph), which is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme). For example, the word ”istui”, (he/she sat down), is a combination of two allomorphs, which are represented in string of allophones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone) ”istu” and in allophone ”i”. ”Istu” is a body of a verb, which indicates the ’vertical-horizontal position’, and ”i” is a sign of a preterit form, which in the grammatical tense expresses actions which took place in the past. There is actually an invisible allomorph in the word, a so-called zero morph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_(linguistics)). This expresses that the subject of the process (he/she) is a third part, not a part of the actual communication. In the Finnish language, one could produce dozens of long strings of allophones based on the body of one verb. Just by modifying the body of the word one can produce an large number of contextual viewpoints where one can use a particular verb. The body of the word itself strongly limits the way you can use it.
On the contrary, working from a database (for me the Internet is just one kind of database) by using certain forms of verbs you can discover specific contextual aspects. Therefore it can be predicted that these contents will be strongly related, because the same form of the verb has used. My first search engine-based experiments were based on this observation. So at the beginning, my aim was not directly related to FLARF; it has more in common with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poetry.
All of my search engine-based texts contain a basic idea. It is an idealistic form of art. The idea could be some type of observation, hidden statement or hypothesis, which the text tries to prove. The hypothesis could be related to language itself (“I believe this works this way”) or it could be more akin to a sociological root (“A number of people say this, and at same time they say this; I believe there is some kind of hidden contradiction in their mindset or philosophy.”) Or it could be just a flow of inspiration, a type of free association improvisation or automatic writing, which leads to some satisfying results.
One property of collage-based writing, based on the Internet, is that it clearly expresses some kind of sociological or political nature. Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who wrote influential works of literary and rhetorical theory and criticism. He wanted to construct a ”objective psychology” which could effectively and clearly show contradictions of motives in an individual’s mind, or in pair of two individuals, or in Society as a whole. For Bakhtin, verbal discourse was a product of the communion between the speaker and the social situation. Freud talked about denying the unconscious mind as a mechanism, but Bakhtin asked: Could any “mechanism” make such refined logical, ethical, and aesthetic decisions? This kind of “mechanism” should be something else, something which is not included in a world of physical nature, but in a world of ideologies. The concept of the unconscious mind is not for Bakhtin a objective scientific phenomena, but a proof of the mind’s hidden chain of ideology.
Therefore, the Internet has not only broadened public speech discourses which are intended to be literal, it has widened all types of communication with all possible intentions. And this is the real key of the ”objective psychology”. Some can argue: “Why should we make this zero-research? We already know the answer: banality!” This is what I say: There are many things we know we don’t know, or we even don’t know we don’t know. Let’s leave the poetry to the big questions, which automatically avoid the trap of banality.
For the first time we can, by using Internet search-methods, discover what different ages, nationalities, and social classes really think, not only what statistics show or how they answer to polls. We are searching the unconscious mind, not the conscious one. It is more question of how things are repeated, not how they actually are.
The Aviary: What is your favourite place to visit?
Russia.
The Aviary: Why?
Russia is an absolutely contradictory country to Finland. I call the railway from Helsinki to St. Petesrburg “The Psychedelic Tunnel.” It goes from West to East. For me St. Petersburg is more “east” than China. The main thing is that the metaphysical ground is different in Russia than in western Europe. These grounds are exclusionary to each other. In SPb I face the light, which is different.
JANNE NUMMELA (born 1973) is an experimental poet, author of four books of poetry. His first book, On a short trip across thinly frozen ice (Lyhyellä matkalla ohuesti jäätyneen meren yli, poEsia 2006) was published in January 2006, and was the first Finnish poetry book made with the assistance of internet search engines. His second book frigidwinter (frigiditalvi, ntamo 2008) was created in collaboration with the architect Adalbert Aapola. He is also the author of Medusa reactors (Medusareaktorit, ntamo 2009) His most recent collection, Ensyklopedia (Poesia 2011) is a large, 500 page collective work written together with poets Jukka Viikilä and Tommi Nuopponen.
