Eksyneitä eläimiä ja hitaita puita

Ympäristön politisoituminen suomalaisessa luontorunoudessa

• Tero Tähtinen Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74878

Abstract

Lost Animals and Sluggish Trees

The article focuses on the question of how the environment becomes politicized – a subject of a political dispute – in contemporary Finnish poetry. I mainly concentrate on three individual poems: Eila Kivikk’aho’s “Uudet pihat”, Markku Jääskeläinen’s “Ohjeita metsurille” and Timo Hännikäinen’s “Asemalla odottavan”. I examine the ways in which the environment becomes debatable in each of the poems and what kind of ecological and ethical emphases can be read from their rhetorical positions. As theoretical frameworks I utilize both ecocriticism and the study of environmental policy. The former I apply while studying the ideas and attitudes towards nature expressed in the poems, and later while contemplating the broader implications of those ideas in social contexts. At the core of my study is the attempt to find and explore ways of interpretation that do justice to the nonhuman subjects of the poems.

I claim that the traditional, human-centered approach of environmental policy is insufficient for understanding and reaching the nonhuman voices that occur in environmentally oriented poetry. The other main theme in my article is the tendency of the environmental poetry to problematize the sharp distinction between subject and object and to provide alongside with it a potential, asubjective field of experience where the boundary between the observer and the observed dissolves at least momentarily. Thus, poetry can be seen as writing that counters the more categorizing and division-making uses of language.