Kirjoittamisen arkipäiväistäminen Pentti Saarikosken ja Mirkka Rekolan runoudessa

• Suvi Järvinen Jyväskylän yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74933

Abstract

Writing as Part of the Everyday in Pentti Saarikoski’s and Mirkka Rekola’s Poetry

This article examines the processes of writing as part of the everyday in Pentti Saarikoski’s kuljen missä kuljen and Mirkka Rekola’s Ilo ja epäsymmetria, both published in 1965. I argue that both collections make this process visible, and both authors thus actively participate in the discussion about poetry in the 1960s through their poetry.
While Saarikoski’s poetry was appreciated as communicative, democratic poetry, Rekola’s writing was considered as old-fashioned modernist poetry – a characterization associated at the time also with Finnish-Swedish poetry. In this article, I show that despite the attitudes prevalent in the sixties and the conversations concerning the essence and future of poetry, e.g. in the Turku poetry seminar in 1962 and the modernism debate in 1965, Saarikoski and Rekola do not differ as much in their aspirations as in their strategies.

Writing as part of the everyday is a statement that comments on the conversation concerning literature and the essence of poetry. Both poets employ the concreteness of writing as a tool. They combine walking and writing, and show that writing is quotidian; it is work like any other type of work. Rekola’s language focuses on the complexity of perceiving, describing and writing, while Saarikoski examines what kind of perceptions and elements of everyday life can be written into a poem. Both poets also employ the processes examined here to show how form and content both refer to the idea of liberation and the creation of a new reality.