Veivo - Everyday High and Low - Finnish Avant-Garde Poetry of The 1960s in A Rapidly Changing Society

Everyday High and Low – Finnish Avant-Garde
Poetry of the 1960s in a Rapidly Changing Society
Harri Veivo
Abstract
Finnish avant-garde poetry of the 1960s attached importance to national and global
political and social questions, as well as to pop and youth culture and the emerging
consumer society. It sought to connect texts with the contexts of social discourses,
politics and everyday life with devices such as catalogues, montage and anonymous
quotations, thus seeking to undo the discourses of hermeticism and of the autonomy
of art that were characteristic of the modernists of the 1950s.
The 1960s saw the rise of a new interest in the avant-garde in Finnish litera-
ture, and especially in poetry. As elsewhere, the context was marked by the
ever increasing presence of television and of pop and youth cultures (jazz,
rock, mods, hippies), the disintegration of the pre- and post-war value sys-
tems, and the growing social consciousness and politicisation of everyday
life. This created a feeling of crisis, with critics anticipating as early as 1960
the arrival of a radical young generation of writers and artists that would
mark a rupture with the certainties of the past. These tendencies reached
their peak with the occupation by extreme left-wing students of the Old
Students’ House in Helsinki in 1968, the court cases against the writer Hannu
Salama (1964–1967), the performance artist and poet Mattijuhani Koponen
(1968) and the painter Harro Koskinen (1969), all accused of obscenity or
blasphemy, and the emergence of underground artistic movements in Turku
and Helsinki.
The Cold War was also a determining factor. While political sympathy
for the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc was strong among artists and writers,
the West, with its production of consumer goods and popular culture (consid-
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ered as an alternative to traditional “high culture”), aroused more and more

interest. One must not forget that the 1960s were also a period of steady increase
in income, of rapid urbanisation and suburbanisation and of the development
of a consumer society that had yet to face the oil crisis of the 1970s. This in
some sense politically paradoxical situation, with the crisis of the Prague occu-
pation in 1968 as its crux, produced complex and contradictory motivations
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Everyday High and Low 773
that may in retrospect disappear behind the sometimes simplified political

rhetoric of the time.
Articulating New Relationships
One way to approach the Finnish avant-garde poetry of the 1960s is to consider
it as a series of efforts to articulate new relationships between art and the rap-
idly changing everyday, between “high” and “low” and between the different
discourses in society.1 The modernist poetics of the 1950s was based on images,
figures and tropes and, as such, opposed to the predominantly metrical poetry
of the pre-war era. The experimental writing of the 1960s carried this develop-
ment further with texts where associative logic and heterogeneity were the
main structuring principles. On the other hand, in their political commitment
and willingness to discuss social problems the avant-gardists of the 1960s were
opposed to the earlier generation. While the post-war modernists (such as
Paavo Haavikko, Lassi Nummi and Tuomas Anhava) had insisted on the auton-
omy of arts and literature and on the writer’s total commitment to nothing but
writing, the writers who were considered to be at the forefront of progress in
the 1960s confronted pop and youth culture as well as national and global
political struggles. They developed new poetic means of treating these topics,
thus seeking to undo the discourses of hermeticism and autonomy that were
characteristic of the modernists of the 1950s.2 The modernists had quickly
acquired prestige, and their writings were used to evaluate the younger gen-
eration’s works, the new poetry being often characterised in terms of opposi-
tion and difference. One must acknowledge, however, that generational
models have limited value here, as several key writers of the 1960s had pub-
lished their first books in the preceding decade and the post-war modernists
continued their career during the following decades (see Niemi 1983: 14–18).
The attempts to get to grips with changes in everyday life and to navigate in the
new discursive world are visible in the use or imitation of lists and catalogues.
Phone directories, sales catalogues, lists of scientific journals and similar kinds of
“unpoetic”, “everyday” or “foreign” textual elements are inserted by, for example,
1 This article addresses only Finnish poetry written in Finnish. For discussion of the literary
avant-garde in both of the official languages of Finland (Finnish and Swedish), see Vesa
Haapala 2007.
2 On the continuity and differentiation in the development of poetic language from the 1950s
to the ’60s, see Vesa Haapala 2007: 280–284 and Juhani Niemi 1999: 174–179.
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774 Veivo
Väinö Kirstinä in his collection Puhetta (Talk, 1963), Kari Aronpuro in his collage
novel Aperitiff – avoin kaupunki (Aperitif – Open City, 1965) and Brita Polttila in
her collection Tapahtumisia (Occurrences, 1966). The first two of these also
employed the Dewey library classification system in their works, Kirstinä as a
structuring principle in Pitkän tähtäyksen LSD-suunnitelma (Long-Range lsd
Plan, 1967) and Aronpuro as a metatextual labelling device in Minä viihtyy (I Gets
Along Fine, classified on the title page as a Festschrift, 1967); similar kinds of tech-
niques, but with less precision and consequence, were used in Pekka Kejonen’s
Käyttögrafiikkaa (Utility Graphics; Section iii, 1965). Kirstinä, in Luonnollinen
tanssi (Natural Dance, 1965), and Aronpuro, in Minä viihtyy, Aperitiff and
Terveydeksi (Cheers, 1966), as well as Maila Pylkkönen in Virheitä (Faults, 1965),
imitated scientific representation in the form of tables or by adding appendixes
or bibliographies to their works. These poetic experiments are often humorous
attempts to comment on science and social classification principles. They are,
however, just as much constructive efforts to bring literature into closer contact
with other discourses that addressed the transformation of the society. Aronpuro,
in fact, worked as a librarian, had a keen interest in information theory and cyber-
netics and defined his role in the 1960s as a collector, mediator and former of
information and opinions (see the lectures in Aronpuro 1967: 80–94).
Pages 60–61 of Minä viihtyy exemplify Aronpuro’s use of “found” texts and
references to social and political discourses and their interaction with his own
poetic discourse. The invitation to take part in a demonstration against us
politics is set side by side with a text that refers to the un’s Universal Declaration
of Human Rights and rewrites it in condensed form. This rewriting is preceded
by a stanza that comments ironically on exploitation and progress in welfare
reform and urges a more responsible stance. The collection as a whole can be
read as an investigation of social and political discourses, their interrelations
and ways of representing values and ideals, the poet’s “own” discourse often
expressing irony, humour or critique.
Lists, catalogues and collage techniques can be further related to the use of
“ready-made” phrases and the construction of anonymous subjectivities.
Aropuro’s Minä viihtyy demonstrates this tendency in its title, an agrammatical
connection of a subject in the first person singular (“minä”) to a verb in the
third person singular (“viihtyy”), comparable to Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre”.

However, whereas Rimbaud expresses psychological alienation or alterity in
the ego, Aronpuro objectifies the “I” and focuses on issues specific to leisure
society: comfort and enjoyment. This technique is also at use in individual
poems, where Aronpuro employs social types (such as “the well-accommodated”,
“the shy”, “the worker”) as narrators describing their well-being or lack of it.
The language employed in the poems is clearly reminiscent of 1960s’ d iscourses
<UN> ProQuest Ebook Central,

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975, BRILL, 2016.
Found text juxtaposed with Aronpuro’s poetic discourse and reference to the u.n.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the bottom of the page on the left. The
first lines on the right read “The days / of the tasty sandwich / are here / what is the
species of your exploitation?”.
From Kari Aronpuro Minä viihtyy, 1967.
on welfare and progress. Similar devices can be found in Kirstinä’s works and
in Olli-Matti Ronimus’s Hän tarvitaan (He/She Is Needed, 1967), but in a less
systematic way, whereas Pentti Saarikoski’s “dialectical poetry” and Arvo
Turtianen’s modernist but less experimental works of the 1960s brought every-
day spoken language and slang into poetry. Together, these works expanded
poetry from the lyrical I-centred writing of the 1950s towards new kinds of sub-
jectivities and the questioning of social relations and economic conditions
described and constructed in different kind of discourse.
While the integration of different kinds of social discourse into poetry

already created polyphonic effects, several writers pushed this tendency
towards heteroglossia further and inserted words and phrases in different lan-
guages into their works. Eira Stenberg’s Kapina huoneessa (Revolution in a
Room, 1966) requires its reader to be fluent in Swedish, German and English,
and the same holds true to some extent for Kirstinä’s Luonnollinen tanssi and
Aronpuro’s Terveydeksi and Aperitiff. Aronpuro’s and Kirstinä’s works also
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776 Veivo
experiment with word and image in poems shaped in geometrical forms or

through integration of graphic and cinematographic elements into texts.3 This
technique, however, is not predominant, and is even parodied by Jarkko Laine
in his Muovinen Buddha (Plastic Buddha, 1967).
Väinö Kirstinä’s collage poem “Nattliga frågor answers klo 22” (Nightly
Questions Answers at 10 p.m.), from the collection Luonnollinen tanssi, consists
of phrases, words and numbers that were cut out of the newspaper Helsingin
Sanomat, according to Tristan Tzara’s famous Dada precept “To make a dadaist
poem” from 1920. The material is very heterogeneous, consisting of shreds of
discussions on tax policies, Finnish and global foreign politics, the Cold War,
economics, sports, culture and advertisements. The text connects, with syntac-
tic and semantic jumps and shortcuts, elements from the categories of “high” and
“low”, “art” and “everyday”, and “politics” and “consumption”. Occasionally
the effects are humorous, but the overall tone is anxious. The image-like
Kirstinä’s concrete poetry appropriation of Tzara’s method of dada collage.

From Väinö Kirstinä Luonnollinen tanssi, 1964.
3 An appendix in Aronpuro’s Terveydeksi has the planned scenario for an experimental tv

documentary called Zodiac, directed by Arvo Ahlroos in 1966. The title of the novel Aperitiff –
avoin kaupunki can also be read as reference to Roberto Rossellini’s film Roma città aperta
(1945), the themes of war and city being common to both works (see Niemi 1983: 91).

aspects of the text can be seen as representing the mushroom cloud of a

nuclear bomb on the right and on the left a bomb or a drop. The image-like
aspects, like the verbal structure of the poem, remain, however, suggestive.
According to Kirstinä, the poem and the collection in general were an effort to
push radical aesthetics as far as possible. The texts were supposed to contain
items of reality and not symbols (Hosiasluoma 1996: 129–133).
If the above-mentioned texts expanded the repertoire of poetry towards dif-
ferent kind of discourse and text (one should also add invoices, money transfer
orders, chess puzzles, logarithm tables and id documents to the list), another
tendency was towards intertextuality and literary minimalism. Henrik
Alcenius’s Mitä tämä on (What This Is, 1964) addresses the question of the
ontology of poetry in its very title, and this interrogation is further developed
in the first section, constructed as a rearranged word collage from Saarikoski’s
Mitä tapahtuu todella? (What Is Really Going On?, 1962). Alcenius’s technique –
and the dropping of the question mark in the title – problematises Saarikoski’s
orientation towards politically engaged questioning of reality and presents the
work as a statement on the conditions of poetic language.
Minimalism and concision of expression were to become characteristic fea-
tures in the poetry of the following decades, but they may be considered to
have reached a peak in Osmo Jokinen’s Nollapiste (Point Zero, 1964). This work
consists of blank pages where individual, double or triple full stops occasionally
appear, creating an impression of ellipses and thus of absent semantic content
that is further enhanced by page numbering and the division of the text into
sections. Jokinen questions the very conditions of what is accepted as poetry
and what is not (Kantola 2004).
Transnational Connections: From Avant-Garde to Underground
The poetry of the 1960s sought to connect to literary movements and cultural
tendencies outside Finland. While essays on concrete poetry, Dada and lettrism
and translations of Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir
Mayakovsky, among others, appeared in literary magazines (see Janna Kantola’s
essay on Finnish cultural magazines in Section 3), references to avant-garde

precursors were also developed in the poems and in dedications. Often it seems
to have been a question of naming keywords that help to situate influences, but
occasionally the relationship is stronger, as when Saarikoski appropriated
Alexander Calder’s aesthetics of the mobile in his flexible layout or when
Anselm Hollo in trobar: löytää (Trobar: To Find, 1964) not only names Apollinaire
and his work but also uses techniques of heterogeneous everyday speech
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778 Veivo
citation or conversation poetry, as developed by the French poet (on Apollinaire’s

techniques, see Jauss 1988). Veikko Polameri’s typed portrait of Apollinaire
(1965) also testifies to his significance, due to a great extent to his key role in the
1962 anthology of French modernist poetry in translation Tulisen järjen aika
(The Era of Burning Reason) and the interest his calligrammes aroused among
Finnish poets interested in word and image relationships.4 Alongside this will to
anchor their writing in the European avant-garde tradition, poets sought connec-
tions to contemporary literature, arts, music and popular culture from the us.
Pekka Kejonen’s Käyttögrafiikkaa (Utility Graphics) (1965), for example, con-
tains a poem titled “Toinen huuto” (Another Howl) written “in Ginsberg’s man-
ner and dedicated to him”; Jarkko Laine’s Muovinen Buddha (1967) mentions
Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan and “Frankie-boy” (Frank Sinatra), along
with Jesse James, Coca-Cola and hot dogs; and Hollo’s trobar maps Apollinaire
with Pound and Ginsberg and the Helsinki suburb of Pitäjänmäki with the New
York of the beatniks and the Paris of the existentialists. If the references to the
European tradition are mostly directed towards “high” art, the connections to
the us clearly seek to overcome divisions of high and low and to engage popular
and consumer culture in poetry, to integrate them both as indications of muta-
tions in contemporary society and as items of everyday reality.
In Kejonen’s, Laine’s and, to some extent, Aronpuro’s works these references
appear together with coarse language and descriptions of bohemian charac-
ters. For the young generation, jazz and later rock and hippie culture – and the
consumption of alcohol and drugs – offered means to express dissociation
from the traditional social values and role models and to engage in alternative
cultural production. This is represented in an exemplary way in Kejonen’s
prose work Jamit (Jam Session, 1963) as well as in Laine’s Muovinen Buddha.
Bohemia was not only a theme but also a way of acting, best exemplified by
Kejonen and Saarikoski, whose provocative actions and drinking combined
with personal charisma attracted the attention of a public who considered
them proof of an anti-bourgeois stance. Both writers had a close, almost sym-
biotic relationship to the media of the time, the public role of the bohemian
poet becoming eventually a source of income and their proper names acquir-
ing symbolic meanings reflected in other writers’ texts.5
4 The portrait illustrates the cover of Toistatasataa runoilijaa, the 1989 anthology of poetry
translation from Finnish literary magazines of the 1960. It was originally published in
Eteläsuomalainen 4–5/1965.
5 See, for example, Hollsten (2012), the Runoseminaari proceedings from the Turku seminar on
poetry in 1962, Hosiasluoma 1998: 121–135, 181–185 and 215–218 and Saarikoski’s tv interview
on 31 January 1974, visible at http://yle.fi/elavaarkisto/.

At the end of the 1960s alternative cultural production took a more radical
turn as underground groups inspired by the transnational hippie and yippie
movements appeared in Helsinki and Turku (see Komulainen and Leppänen
2009, Lindfors and Salo 1988). The Helsinki group published the subversive
review Ultra, containing, for example, instructions on shoplifting and the pro-
duction of home-made drugs. While Ultra’s literary input consisted of a few
translations of writers such as Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones and some self-ironic
texts by Finnish underground writers, the group had a more considerable
impact with the band The Sperm, led by Mattijuhani Koponen. The Sperm was
a rather loose collective that combined rock music with film, light shows and
provocative theatre in events that link the happenings of the early 1960s with
the performance art of the late twentieth century. The Turku group staged simi-
lar kinds of activities, but with a more literary orientation. The Turku under-
ground review Aamurusko (Sunrise) published articles directed against
the “system” – often mixing humour with aggressive critique and provocation –
and translations of mainly us authors such as Ginsberg, William Burroughs and
Jerry Rubin. The main protagonists of the group, Jarkko Laine, Markku Into and
M.A. Numminen, were active in the rock band Suomen Talvisota 1939–1940
(The Finnish Winter War 1939–1940). The band performed with a changing
crew of players in concerts that were a mixture of happening, literary soirée
and recycled Dada cabaret, and recorded the lp Underground Rock, which is
nowadays seen as a crucial step in the integration of rock discourse into Finnish.
At the same time, Laine embarked on a career as poet, novelist and playwright,
characterised by critics as the “son of Marx and Coca-Cola”. Numminen and
Into also produced a considerable literary output in the following years.
Despite the provocative attitudes cultivated by the underground, the fron-
tiers between the groups, movements and sub-fields of culture were porous.
While there existed a certain kind of a rivalry between Helsinki and Turku,
artists such as Numminen and Peter Widén participated in both groups.
Numminen considered the underground to be in a direct line of descent from
the avant-garde of the early and mid-1960s, the two notions being interchange-
able for him. Laine, on the other hand, had his poems published early on in
Saarikoski’s review Aikalainen (The Contemporary) and by the renowned pub-
lishing house Otava. In 1969 he was recruited as editorial secretary to the

review Parnasso, which heralded the modernists of the 1950s. Laine, Into,
Widén and Numminen also had access to mainstream radio when the Finnish
public broadcasting company wanted to present the underground to the
general public. The programmes were, however, suspended after five transmis-
sions as “uninformative”. After two or three years of activities, the underground
groups resumed their normal activities in 1970.
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780 Veivo
The Turn of the Decade: Giving Up Experimentation
The 1960s were in general a period of mutation of the writer’s public role and
of the literary field. Many commentators have used the writer and critic Erno
Paasilinna’s characterisation and described the 1960s as a period of debating
and media-oriented “anti-writers” (see, for example, Laitinen 1981: 572 and
Niemi 1983: 12–13). There was also a mutation in the genre system, as poets and
novelists started to publish pamphlets, reportages and documentary prose,
seeking a more direct contact with the reading public and the social problems
of their time. The numerous writers’ conferences and seminars on contempo-
rary literature contributed to the same effort.6 As the connections between
culture and politics became closer and closer, several writers abandoned the
detached attitude of the post-war modernists and actively sought to justify
their work according to socialist and communist ideologies, finally giving up
avant-garde experimentation at the turn of the decade. Somewhat surpris-
ingly, members of the Helsinki underground group went into politics and soon
reached positions at the municipal level. Participation in the underground
provided a symbolic capital that could be invested in the political field. In the
case of Aronpuro, the development led in the following decades to the adop-
tion of Maoism and later of semiotics and deconstruction, while Jouko Tyyri,
Pentti Holappa and Arvo Salo, who represented less radical positions, were
nominated as members of the government in the 1970s and early ’80s and came
to symbolise the growing influence of writers and the extending politicisation
of culture, before the ideal of engagement slowly lost its appeal in the 1980s
and 1990s.
Works Cited
Aronpuro, Kari. 1967. Minä viihtyy. Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä.

Haapala, Vesa. 2007. “Kokeellinen kirjallisuus ja kirjallinen vastarinta Suomessa –
kiintopisteenä 1960-luku” in Katajamäki, Sakari and Harri Veivo (eds.) Kirjallisuuden
avantgarde ja kokeellisuus. Helsinki: Gaudeamus: 277–304.
Hollsten, Anna. 2012. “Tapaus Kejonen: esimerkki 1960 – ja 1970-luvun tunnustuskirjal-

lisuuden ja julkisuuden suhteesta” in Avain 1: 3–18.
Hosiasluoma, Yrjö. 1996. Tähdet lähellä, kengässä lunta. Väinö Kirstinän öitä ja päiviä.
Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
6 On the connections between culture and politics and the mutation of the genre system, see
Niemi 1999: 161–164 and 169–171, and Anna Makkonen 1995.

Hosiasluoma, Yrjö. 1998. Euroopan reunalla, kosken korvalla. Jumalten narri Pentti
Saarikoski. Helsinki: Like.
Jauss, Hans-Robert. 1988. “1912: Threshold to an Epoch. Apollinaire’s Zone and Lundi
Rue Christine” in Yale French Studies 74: 39–66.
Kantola, Janna. 2004. “Afterword” in Jokinen, Osmo, Janna Kantola, Hubert van den
Berg and Martin Frijns (eds.) Nollapiste Nulpunt. Nijmegen: Vantilt and Martien
Frijns, 2004: n.p.
Komulainen, Matti and Petri Leppänen. 2009. U:n aurinko nousi lännestä. Turun
Undergroundin historia. Turku: Sammakko.
Laitinen, Kai. 1981. Suomen kirjallisuuden historia, second edition. Helsinki: Otava.
Lindfors, Jukka and Salo Markku. 1988. Ensimmäinen aalto. Helsingin Underground
1967–1970. Helsinki: Odessa.
Makkonen, Anna. 1995. “Pamfletista tunnustukseen: lajimurros 1960-ja 1970-luvulla” in
Ihonen, Markku and Yrjö Varpio (eds.) Helmi, Simpukka, Joki. Kirjallisuushistoria
tänään. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura: 102–114.
Niemi, Juhani. 1983. Kirjailijoita ja epäkirjailijoita. Pikakuvia aikalaisista. Helsinki:
Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Niemi, Juhani. 1999. “Kirjallisuus ja sukupolvikapina” in Lassila, Pertti (ed.) Suomen
kirjallisuushistoria 3. Rintamakirjeistä tietoverkkoihin. Helsinki: Suomalaisen
Kirjallisuuden Seura: 158–186.
Runoseminaari. Turku: Tajo, 1962.
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Everyday High and Low – Finnish Avant-Garde

Poetry of the 1960s in a Rapidly Changing Society

ered as an alternative to traditional “high culture”), aroused more and more

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004310506_081

that may in retrospect disappear behind the sometimes simplified political

Articulating New Relationships

third person singular (“viihtyy”), comparable to Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre”.

<UN> ProQuest Ebook Central,

While the integration of different kinds of social discourse into poetry

experiment with word and image in poems shaped in geometrical forms or

Kirstinä’s concrete poetry appropriation of Tzara’s method of dada collage.

3 An appendix in Aronpuro’s Terveydeksi has the planned scenario for an experimental tv

<UN> ProQuest Ebook Central,

aspects of the text can be seen as representing the mushroom cloud of a

Transnational Connections: From Avant-Garde to Underground

essay on Finnish cultural magazines in Section 3), references to avant-garde

citation or conversation poetry, as developed by the French poet (on Apollinaire’s

<UN> ProQuest Ebook Central,

lishing house Otava. In 1969 he was recruited as editorial secretary to the

The Turn of the Decade: Giving Up Experimentation

Aronpuro, Kari. 1967. Minä viihtyy. Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä.

Hollsten, Anna. 2012. “Tapaus Kejonen: esimerkki 1960 – ja 1970-luvun tunnustuskirjal-

<UN> ProQuest Ebook Central,

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© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi 10.1163/9789004310506_081