You can listen to the episode here.

Episode Description:

Today’s guest is the Finnish poet Reetta Pekkanen. We discussed how she came to write poetry, what life is like as a professional poet, how she makes every word count, and more.

Bio: Reetta Pekkanen (poet; Finland) has published the collections SMALL HARD BUDS (2014), TENDRIL (2019), SMUGGLIGNS (2021) and CUT TULIPS (2023). Her poetry focuses on themes of personal and environmental loss, non-human perspectives, and natural semiotics. Among her awards are the Kalevi Jäntti Prize, the Katri Vala Prize and the Silja Hiidenheimo Memorial Stipend; she is a member of the poetry publishing cooperative Poesia. Her participation was made possible by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. 
 
Read Reetta Pekkanen’s English writing sample: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/PEKKANEN_sample_formatted.pdf

Read Reetta Pekkanen’s writing sample in the original language: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/Pekkanen_sample_original.pdf

Say the World: An International Writing Podcast is made by the International Writing Program. The hosts are IWP Director Christopher Merrill, most recently the author of ON THE ROAD TO LVIV (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and IWP Communications Coordinator Mike Meginnis, most recently the author of DROWNING PRACTICE (Ecco, 2022). Additional research, transcription, and other support provided by Research Assistant Derick Edgren Otero.

IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the U.S. Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you’d like to donate to IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support.

Learn more about IWP at iwp.uiowa.edu.

Episode Transcript:

[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1" by T. Bless & the Professionals]

Mike Meginnis:  
You're listening to Save The World: an International Writing podcast, Mike Meginnis, the Communications Coordinator at the IWP.

Christopher Merrill:  
And Christopher Merrill, the director of the IWP. 

MM:  
This week's interview is a conversation with Reetta Pekkanen, who is a poet from Finland. Among Reetta's many other good qualities, she has a talent for brevity, which leaves us with a little extra time for conversation. So I wanted to check in with you about—Well, first of all, how are you doing?

CM:  
I'm okay, and you?

MM:  
I am...I'm having one of those periods where I'm, like, totally sick of myself. And I don't particularly—like, I'm just kind of, you know, you just, you have months where you're, you're feeling like you're at peace with yourself, and then you have months where you feel at war with yourself. I'm a little more at war. But that's okay. That's all part of the process.

CM:  
Is that a function of having turned in a book—a new book—a couple of weeks ago?

MM:  
It's, you know, that yes, actually, I hadn't thought of it. But that's exactly what it is. I turned in a draft for my agent. I got it. You know, there's the there's the point that you don't want to give the book to a person who is your professional colleague in writing fiction. You don't want to give it to him when you finish your first draft, probably, unless they've asked for that. There's certainly people that work that way. But like, when I worked with this agent, for the first time, she was working with something that was much closer to a first draft than I realized. So I didn't want to give her that experience over again because we had to rewrite that a lot. And you know, I just, I don't want to be the frustrating client. But you also don't want to work it over so much that when she inevitably comes back with like, the various problems that I didn't see, I'm like, Well, I've been working on this non stop for two years. I'm, I'm sick of it. I don't ever want to look at it again. So sure, I'll work on this. But I'm mad at you. Right? Like, you need to find a midway between those two extremes.

CM:  
I know the feeling. Yeah, yeah. In my case, I'm writing—I'm correcting galleys on a couple of books. One is a book of translations. And the other is a collaboration of a book I wrote with the late Marvin Bell. And when you're doing the galleys, you realize all of your shortcomings as a writer, don't you? Because you can't really make many corrections without incurring the wrath of your editor.

MM:  
Yeah, you really just have to sort of commit to it in a way that that you don't up to that point, there's always even in the late revisions there, there's always the chance that you could think of something better and, like, often you do. I do a fair amount of revising fairly late into the process. But yes, there comes a point where it gets into the layouts, and then you have to stop and just immediately end it unless you can like substitute a word for a word of the same length.

CM:  
Poets know how to do that better than almost anyone. And Reetta's a wonderful example of that. Her poems are short, but they feel as if they are chiseled out of very particular kind of stone so that no word is wasted in the overall effect of the poem. It's almost a spiritual discipline the way that she writes—at least that's how I imagined it as we were, as we were speaking, and that's what gives the work of particular, almost holy hush to it.

MM:  
It's interesting, too, in translation, I feel like I understand her poems completely. And yet, were I to summarize one for somebody else, I think I would completely—I would reduce it to nothing. It would not be worth their time.

CM:  
Because she's a wonderful example of a poet whose work embodies a particular moment in consciousness. We're seeing how the mind works. The poem doesn't necessarily have a message or a theme, but it is probing the basic existential condition of life in really interesting ways that prompt the reader, at least in my case, to imagine what else might be going on.

[transition music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]

Reetta Pekkanen:  
[Reetta Pekkanen reads a poem in Finnish.]

CM:  
A hundred thousand miles of black keys alone, and not a single hand able to reach them. A hollow comfort that opens in the leaving unsaid. Hardly comforts another near the cave's mouth in the areas still touched by light. There's a see-through quality to happiness. Zone of twilight. I nearly got there.

RP:  
[Reetta Pekkanen reads a poem in Finnish.]

CM:  
All that's heavy, like comets and guilt, is taken seriously much easier than joy. Here in space it's dark around the clock. We're circling a second- or third-generation star. Illuminating night clouds illuminate.

RP:  
[Reetta Pekkanen reads a poem in Finnish.]

CM:  
Even a single houseplant helps to alleviate loneliness. Intertwined they swarm against the night sky. You should flutter entire in the wind when you're torn. It's shortsighted to remain as you are when you're torn.

RP:  
[Reetta Pekkanen reads a poem in Finnish.]

CM:  
Get a point on the compass, and you've got all the points. To get just one sound you have to be willing to hear the noise. What supposedly was unique and fragile now dully repeats. Owls sleep inside live trees and people live and sleep inside dead trees.

RP:  
[Reetta Pekkanen reads a poem in Finnish.]

CM:  
If it explodes, but it's not in a hurry, it is probably serious.

RP:  
[Reetta Pekkanen reads a poem in Finnish.]

CM:  
But you cannot just be approached, you can approach. And in the same instance you thought you saw a bud in a spot where there's still no growth, you already proved yourself capable of believing it to be true. The vine draws weight out of nothing. The vine keeps pushing further out.

RP:  
[Reetta Pekkanen reads a poem in Finnish.]

CM:  
In froth flotation, minerals containing gold, sulfur, and copper attach themselves onto air bubbles and rise to the surface. I have ten fingers to touch you with, with each onto a slightly different place.

RP:  
So my name is Reetta Pekkanen. I'm a poet, I come from Finland, where I'm based in Turku. And now I'm here for the International Writing Program. Pleased to be here today.

CM:  
And you are, as I understand it, a full time poet.

RP:  
I am. That's true.

CM:  
How is that possible?

RP:  
That's a good question. I feel I'm, I've been lucky enough that it is possible. We have, like, in comparison, our grant system in Finland is rather good. So even though they are, of course, like, there's a lot of competition, but there are a few of us lucky ones that are able to commit themselves to writing even poems, which don't really sell enough to kind of support your living just by that.

CM:  
So can you tell us what a typical day looks like for you in your homeland?

RP:  
Oh, gosh, I don't know if I have such thing as a typical day. I feel like it depends so much on like, what point of the process I am in my writing, like, I'm quite slow at writing. So I've published three books of poetry so far. And in between of each book, there's been almost five years. So they are the processes are long. So like, the first two years look quite different from the, like, point where I'm actually just editing things and trying to polish it up. So yeah, it depends. There are some times or periods when I work very intensively and, like, then it can almost look like a normal working day, from nine to five, you know. But then there are days when, if you look at me, I don't look like I'm doing anything. Something is clearly happening in my head, I hope.

CM:  
But it seems to me that your poems come from a great distance. There's a lot said in the silences between stanzas, the whitespace, between stanzas and even word, the word I have the sense that each phrase is a distillation of a lot of different ideas and velocities of thought. Is that a fair assessment of what your writing practice might be?

RP:  
I think so. I think so. Yes. And I've, I feel like I'm, I'm not good at writing much. So the art for me is to, like, choose the words really carefully. And to make them communicate with each other. Like, I wouldn't say they are like super fragmented, my poems, but the element of the silence and the pause between words and verses, it's really important, like, what comes next? How to put these things next to each other? And what does that kind of start, in your mind?

CM:  
Is this coming out of a particular tradition of Finnish poetry? Or how do you place yourself in relation to the poets who came before you?

RP:  
Wow, that's a big question. I'm sure they can be seen as part of several traditions. But like, in the past, I don't know how many years, maybe ten years, like I mentioned, the word fragmented. So that's one tendency that's for sure been present in the Finnish poetry, like fragments, and the aesthetics of that. So they kind of form something together, but they are seemingly small pieces of writing. So that's present in my writing, for sure. Even though I wouldn't consider that I'm like, really fragmented.

CM:  
More of a serial kind of poetry than fragment connected to fragment connected to fragment.

RP:  
Yes, yes, there is the serial thinking. And also like, the book itself, like also, as a reader, I, what I do, I tried to read poetry books, like, once, the whole book. Like I don't take pauses, I read the whole thing. And also, when I write I kind of intend it to be read all, whole book at once. So it's not that much about single poems for me, but the entity and what does it say as a book? And how does it work as a book? And what kind of points there are in your reading experience of the whole thing?

CM:  
And how long would a typical book of yours be?

RP:  
(Laughs) Yeah, I guess that depends on the speed in which you read, but they're not that long. Yeah, half an hour, an hour.

CM:  
but, but they seem to pack so much energy in in each book.

RP:  
Yeah. And of course, I hope there's more to them. Like you can always come back and maybe you want to go back to them and look more closely at the first sight of them. I don't know. It's important for me that they are—there's a lot of them together.

CM:  
The American and poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück once noted in an essay that when she finished writing a book, she would go through the book, and note all the words that she used more than once and rhetorical strategies that she felt she had overused. And therefore there would be a silence after the completion of the book in which her imagination, both figurative and auditory might be gathering new materials. I wonder if that's something like what you go through after finishing a book. And those first two years afterwards. Is there a sort of search for a new kind of a language new kind of a new way to proceed as a poet?

RP:  
I'm quite sure there is. And I feel like you kind of feel when you come up with something important that these words now have a significant meaning to them. Even they can be very ordinary words, but then they start to repeat in another context. And yeah, that those kind of threads certainly go somewhere inside the writing. And yeah, that sounds very familiar to like, when the book is done, I kind of want that the certain words, those that are really play a role in that book, that they kind of, all of them can be picked up from the book. And they make sense, like they refer to same things in a way. If I talk about, I don't know what, like a vine is important in my previous book, so that there are several vines in different poems. So that they are, they don't contradict each other in that, what they refer to. So that kind of thinking is a kind of important—yes.

CM:  
So it begins to generate a kind of momentum, a sort of energy, right?

RP:  
Yeah, yeah. And they kind of echo each other. When you read "vine" for the fourth time, then it means more than in that, just that single point, right?

CM:  
Can you tell us something about your beginnings as a poet?

RP:  
Well, like, writing, and more—so prose writing has been always present in my life. So at first I thought I'd be writing novels. But then in my—I was maybe twenty-one when I enrolled into this writing school, and I tried to work on like a first draft of a novel, but it was too difficult. I couldn't do it. And then, somehow, almost by accident, I started writing poems because I found them easier and shorter. Like, okay, this is what I do. So I have something to show people. But then what happened is that I got really excited writing them, and it opened something new, because I didn't have any pressure on myself. So yeah. Since then, I've been focusing more to poetry. But yeah, I don't know. What, actually, what I am thinking of doing next might take me a little bit back towards writing prose and novels and kind of new, liberating feeling that now that's where I don't have any pressures on myself. But poetry is more like, "Okay, I'm a professional poet." There's something that doesn't feel like, yeah, it's not liberating.

CM:  
Hence, you're interested in hybrid forms. That's what might mix poetry and prose?

RP:  
Yes, yes. Precisely. So, or I'm, yeah, like during these maybe fifteen years that I haven't really been writing anything else but poetry. My idea of what prose can do and what a novel can look like, or hybrid text, it has changed a lot. So I feel like I've been opening up to new concepts of what a book can look like. And that feels right now very exciting to me. So that I don't have to approach it as like in tradition of some certain genre, but I can take it as a more open question of possibilities.

MM:  
Have there been particular books that were making you aware of those opportunities, things that you saw, and you thought, "Oh, I could have been doing that. Or I could try that next." Or is it more like impulses that you have had while you've been doing your work? And you've said, "No, I can't do that right now." I'm working on this other thing. It's sort of been waiting for you to come back to it.

RP:  
Probably both. But like, yes, it has been like, I've read many books in the recent years that have like opened up new thoughts for me or like, yeah, that has made it possible to approach new kinds of writing in that sense, but I'm so bad at name dropping, so I don't know if I can really name anyone. But yeah, in like, already in the Finnish literature, in the past few years, there's been excellent books coming up that are neither prose or poetry. And not prose-poetry either, but something completely different.

CM:  
Some new terrain to explore. Without maybe the baggage of having to figure out a plot?

RP:  
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's enough that you have some sort of narrative elements to keep it together. But then you can also have the freedom of writing poetry where you can just follow a feeling or follow words and see where that takes you. So you don't have to, like, fill in every gap when you write. But you can jump from one place to another and have confidence that the reader will find the connection between these two things.

CM:  
I'm gonna guess that you, in such writing, you would not know what your destination is when you set out.

RP:  
Oh, no, yeah, yeah. And that's, I think that was my problem in the first place with prose, because I, I've never been able to know where I'm going as a writer. And, and I taught that you're supposed to know when, if you want to write a novel. The thing is, you have to plan a plot and know what's going to happen in which chapter, and I could never do that. So now I feel like okay, maybe I can do this my way, the poet way, in a way.

CM:  
You wrote, as I understand it, for procedural poems, where you wrote one word per day.

RP:  
Yeah, that was a whole project that I had. And actually, like I mentioned earlier, I've written three books of poetry. And in that, in addition to that, there's a chapter book of poetry. And that consists of these procedural poems, and an essay that kind of walks you through the process. And yes, what I did is I wrote one word per day, like one day, I would start, say, twenty new poems, and to each of those poems I would add one word. And the next day I would again add one word to each of those poems and see where that takes me. And the self-made rules were that I'm not allowed to edit anything that I've written. And I can't plan ahead. So it remains difficult, but also really interesting to see what's happened.

CM:  
In effect, twenty separate poems. It's like a chess master who can play several games at once.

RP:  
Kind of. Kind of.

MM:  
I have that same image as you're describing it. I was also thinking about the player going down the line and doing one move per and then coming back.

RP:  
Yeah, that's funny. But what I loved about it is that, I guess there's no other way to write twenty different poems so simultaneously. So what happens is that they really start to communicate with each other, those texts. And that's really interesting to me.

CM:  
And how many days did this procedure go on for?

RP:  
Um, well, I did several rounds, but one round would be maybe a little less than two months, five or six weeks, something like that.

CM:  
So that's a, that's a decent-sized poem by the end of five or six weeks.

RP:  
Yeah, yeah, it is. But for the chapbook, I did give myself a permission to kind of cut the poem where I felt like, "Okay, that's the ending." And then I just keep going, and it gets worse and worse. So I could just delete some words from the end of the poem.

CM:  
If I may ask, was there a subject to these different poems? Or how did they distinguish one from another?

RP:  
I wouldn't say they had any subjects. What I did, I really just tried to trust my subconsciousness. Kind of just see what comes out. If I have, I just listened to this moment. This morning. I normally wrote them in the morning to get my kind of head going. It was the first thing I did in a day.

CM:  
So I'm gonna guess the first day would be the hardest day coming up with twenty different beginnings, right?

RP:  
Or, in a way, it was the easiest day, just you can start with anything. But the moment that that word is there, the next day, you need to come up with something like also that grammatically fits the context. And in that sense, it gets harder and harder. And also to keep it interesting.

MM:  
Was it always twenty different words? Or were you allowed to use the same word in two different poems ever?

RP:  
I was allowed. Yes. And oftentimes, you would just—because you sometimes you need to use the word "and," "Or." Something like this. And those were the boring days. Can't really avoid it.

MM:  
They're useful words. 

RP:  
Yeah. 

MM:  
I enjoyed your essay that you shared with us. Maybe actually, it'd be interesting if you were to read the part that I had highlighted.

RP:  
What reading Lispector and good poetry can do at its best is give us tools for recognizing, embracing, and, ultimately, falling in love with the ambivalence and paradoxicality of the everything that we call nature. It can help us form a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of our existence. Of all the beauty and horror, grief and distress, ours and that of the cockroach. Perhaps, then we can start and seeing the gap between the self and the other, the eater and the eaten, just like happens to TH. Perhaps the most relevant question, then, is not how we are treating others, regardless of their species, but simply how we are, for our own sake, as much as anyone else's.

MM:  
Thank you. That's perfect. So the question that I had, as I was rereading this and thinking about, what I'd like to ask you about it is, I'm wondering what kind of relationship you'd like to have. And we'd like your work to have with nature, and whether that's something that can be intentionally cultivated, or whether it's a matter of recognizing the relationship that already exists?

RP:  
That's an important and a tricky question. Because I like to start with—I find the term "nature" very tricky and problematic, like, what does it mean? Because I don't, I don't think it's something that we are looking from outside. But obviously, it's, we are part of it, it's inside us. So it's not about being separate, but the like, yeah, more like being part of it. And that is the relationship that I have with nature. And I feel like my writing has no other option but to have the same relationship with it. So it's more it's a bigger and deeper question than just like, "What are you writing about?" I don't, I don't see it like that.

CM:  
Is there concern in Finnish poetry with ecopoetics? Is that a part of the literary discourse?

RP:  
Yes, there is, and it has been more and more present in, in poetry and in all literature, for the past years or decades. And it's, of course, one way to approach poetry and literature, like, okay, so today we have this environmental poetry or ecopolitics. But yeah, I feel like it would be really weird if we weren't writing about that. So it's kind of obvious, it needs to be there. But to me, it's not still interesting subject to approach it as a subject, but it's unavoidable to have it, like, as part of like a fundamental part of our experience of living in this era, where, with all these catastrophes, it just, we have no choice. But then we have to find a way to relate to that. And maybe that's where the writing and poetry can come in. So I feel like, also in my work, it's very present there, or you can read them, like they, they are trying to come in terms with the emotions and the feelings that, that we have because of living in this era.

CM:  
Well, we're talking today just after two dams burst in Libya and thousands of people have lost their lives. And we know about the extreme weather events that seem to be almost daily occurrences now, so it's hard, even for the most willfully oblivious to not recognize that something is going on in the natural world, which is to say, in our world, right?

RP:  
Yes, yes. Precisely. So. And that brings a lot of feelings.

CM:  
I also wonder if—You're coming from a country that has only recently joined NATO in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is a really large step in a different direction than Finland traditionally has been. I wonder if that's starting to—the the consequences of that are starting to ripple through literary life in your country.

RP:  
I haven't maybe noticed it yet myself. I'm sure that's one of those things that are there. And afterwards you, you're able to see that okay, this is what happened then. So, in the following three years, we got these books, and it's kind of engraved in there, just like COVID, it has influenced everything. But yeah, I don't remember reading anything, like poetry or anything that would be...

CM:  
These are dramatic changes. 

RP:  
They are.

CM:  
From COVID to the climate crisis to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The world has in significant ways been turned upside down. And poets have a special possibility or responsibility or obligation in such moments. Do you feel that way?

RP:  
Yeah. On the other hand, I feel like saying that it's not our duty. It's now our responsibility to tell the world what, what to do next. But yeah, of course there is this, that we are there kind of sniffing the air in the front line, in some sense, like, what, what will come next? What does all this mean? What is the next direction that we can take? So that's, that's probably there. That's true.

CM:  
Yeah. I was thinking about just in the case of the IWP when we had writers from all around the world gathered here on 9/11. And I don't think anyone really knew how to write about it, how to address it, how to interrogate it, but there was a common recognition that the world has just changed. And we don't know what's going to happen next. But it will likely be interesting, and perhaps terrifying. And looking back on 9/11, I still don't know what to make of it all.

RP:  
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes I feel like the biggest things are so big that you don't really see them. Like they are so big. I don't know what to compare it to, that if they are right in front of you. This? Yeah, you'll feel nothing. Maybe. Yeah. But afterwards, you see, okay, that was big.

MM:  
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your experience coming to Iowa. And especially, I'm curious if there's like one really interesting thing that you've learned either from your fellow writers, or just in your time here.

RP:  
There are so many things I've learned already. But also, in this case, I feel like it will come afterwards. I will realize it afterwards. First, I have to live through it. And I just try to suck in everything. All the influences that are—we are like soaked in influences. So I'm taking that in and afterwards I'll see what, what just—what did just happen. And that's how I'm feeling in a way. It's a wonderful bubble that I'm living in right now.

CM:  
And are you writing while you're here?

RP:  
I am. I am. I don't have the time for that all the time. But then again, I'm not like, I'm not demanding that from myself that I would have to be writing while I'm here. But it's happening. It's happening.

[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1 - DoGBeaT Remix" by DoGBeaT]

MM:  
Say the World: an International Writing Podcast is a production of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you'd like to donate to the IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support. Links to further information and additional credits for this episode are in the show notes.