poems

Heaven above, and ours, Hell right here, after Dorian Lynskey, History of protest songs, 33 revolutions per minute. 2010 /When is revolution, irrational right and wrong, essays and poems, 2014/Is female body a commodity?2020

| Henna Timanttimetsä

”Oh, I ain’t a Communist necessarily, but I’ve been in the red all my life.” 
”Work and pray, live on hay/ You’ll get pie in the sky when you die” The Preacher and The Slave, 1911
The Red Song Book 1932The Socialist Rebel Song Book 1934Negro Songs of Protest 1936 

Political message put into the arena of entertainment, books I can imagine in my hand, small, worn out with yellowish smelly pages, the ongoing rebellion, ongoing inspiration of coal miners, their wives, copper miners, their wives, textile workers, their husbands, inspired by Woody Guthrie, This Land Is your Land, 1944. ”I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world..that make you take pride in yourself and your work” Woody Guthrie’s mission statement which he read on the radio 1944 in his weekly show on New York’s WNEW. 

This is a kind of Poem, this is a kind of scribbles, I end up seeing the same thing, a pattern, but I cannot put my finger on it 

Failed to quicken the pulse, Ella May Wiggins who was shot dead during the Gastonia textile strike 1929, hero of the left. Message belonged to whoever stuck a flag on it. And increasingly the flag was red. Leftist intellectuals were in love, most of all, with the idea of a common man. Sometimes he drank, he fought, even shot his woman down. There was nothing ennobling about it. Music of rumors, dreams, ghost stories and whispers in the night. 

Dust can’t kill me, beneath the cover of bad grammar, misspellings, Okie vernacular, which would come in handy in darker times. 

It had not rained in four years bitter but exhilarating like biting into a lemon. To know about Confucius, did he know more about hypocrisy than he did about nature of American society. 

Something fishy for robbing her off her lightness mixed with serrated glass day and night
it was when she discovered heroin in 1940s, and commenced slow dying, scourging hypocrisy 

from sea to ocean from sea to shining sea aw­-shucks, ionization of a affectionately common man. 

Full of bad luck and violent ends. Violent beginnings, startling start, I took these words from this book I found added them here next to my words. I gave words back to you. You do what you can with them. 

What has happened before, what happens now to a worker? Is he/she called a worker anymore, the proletarian, or is it employee, staff, laborer. We have short history of couple of industrial revolutions during which many other kinds of revolutions have taken place. Couple of which have been Feminist. Suffrage ­movement, sexual revolution, inventions of contraception, women’s right to study, abortion, divorce, go to work and have a career. Women’s rights to their bodies are still under questioning, which makes me wonder why. Why female body is the main object of terror and a possession of man? We are still fighting for human rights to happen on many levels. But all in all, women’s rights have taken big steps forwards globally during couple of decades, lots is still to be done. It astonishes me how heavy the battle is. 

2008

| Henna Timanttimetsä
Es ist Zeit, 2008

Lipstick and blood, it is important where the blood comes, obviously. When she bleeds, she bleeds well.

Kuva | | Henna Timanttimetsä

images 2014-2016, Nudity is not shocking to me, violence is. Sex is not wrong, killing is. So people can tolerate blood that comes from other places than vagina and for whatever other reason than bodily function.

Happiness is relative

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Sky is dirty 2001

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Like a living thing

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Strength of Poetry now

| Henna Timanttimetsä
It is as if poets have vanished. Vanished into an old world making way to ’progress’ and ’development’. In need of being an absolute professional poetry is in distress. In desperate need of stating total professionalism a poet is something incomprehensible (how do you make a living. Do you get paid for what you do?), because anything else than professional money-making is ridiculous. Same goes for fine artist of course, but it is obviously more rare to be a poet. It takes something else. To say I am a poet and publish my work online is a hobbyist way unless one makes money. I personally resent the idea of professionalism since my professionalism has been under suspicion always, whatever I did, whatever position I had. It is not enough, never enough. At worst it is nothing, my art is not art and there is always a consultant telling how to make things so that I would be convincing to those who need to be convinced. To be an artist, a female standing alone and do art, should be finding a role of a saleswoman, advertiser, entertainer and please. Poetry to me represents the opposite of that role. I don’t have to please in any way. That is what I am set to do. I enjoy the marginal outsider position for that reason. That is freedom. Professionalism as such is not something of a goal at all. That itself is a flawed way of seeing making art.

Strength of poetry now is to break the need for absolute professionalism, to disturb a search for stability and getting entertainment to keep politics, activism, feelings and other distresses aside and away, to absolutely jeopardize contemporary consciousness and threat the norms. To question the mindset of absolute money-making machinery, ideology of winning, the exceptional of it, smugness of it. To bring anarchy into writing in the net, to making art altogether. To question the ways of making and why make.

Even within the fine arts it is not self-evident there is interest or knowledge over poetry. It is somehow below the image, below the hype and contemporary ’self-evident’ excellence of educated and notified skill and talent.
http://www.cprw.com/stalking-the-typical-poem
When I tell people I teach and – God help me – even write poetry, they often say, “I wish you could explain modern poetry to me. I just don’t understand most of it.”