threat the norms!

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.”

What defines happiness which is presumably our goal – to be happy, carefree and enthusiastic? Is it the emotional side to which we are stuck? Our emotions guide us. Happy people do not need to find anything since they are in perfect state. [Hey! Are you floating?] Or happiness is the state when one is most eager to go searching. Is it an emotional moment to be fulfilled with little. Less can be more than most of us understand. Don’t stuff happiness with too much cream. To learn to understand momentary body of happiness is essential in finding happiness. But what is little then, what is enough, adequate, sufficient? How much of happiness is given and which part we create ourselves?

| Henna Timanttimetsä

What is class anymore other than heritage and a memory. Epoch description in movies and stories. How things have been done, how things will be done by imagined standards. Making money, making a living. Middle-class is very distant to me. For me when I was a kid middle-class marriages never ended to divorce and they had happy family life. So I was a bystander, a spectator visiting lovely homes of my friends. Even though I’m now studying at the university which is one way to middle-class jobs, I do not feel middle-class calling me or that I would want to be part of it. It just is not me nor are institutions that hold class-identity dear.

Competition, winning and what those have got to do with alienation. Is the society emphasizing too much on individual success and to cope on your own.
Why there is alienation? Are we too well taken care of that some of us don’t feel the need to reach out for anything anymore? And is it more common than ever to be alienated? The whole phenomenon of social alienation is linked to concept of normal. Normal behavior, mass of everything, how things look and what we are supposed to be and do with our lives. Person who is alienated in society’s eyes may not feel alienation as a bad thing or harmful. Alienation can be a refuge. Safe haven for a misfit. Some of it is true many people do not know what do. There are too many decisions to make, too much expectations for life. What to be, where to be. If you cannot decide or don’t know or don’t want any of it, you want none of it, you want nothing but to be left alone, in peace. Society has constant demand on us, we must demand much of ourselves. It is good to some point. When can we breath and take a break?

There is a certain apathy and indifference there socially, lack of interest from which alienation springs out. It is a very strange phrase to hear from a fifteen-year-old that he/she does not want to do anything, go anywhere etc. Alienation can mean many things and it is a problematic situation where many things have a dead-end hopelessness.  One does not have a job, intern job, school to go to, friends to be with, hobby to activate and it feels there is nothing for that person. It is a complicated and complete passive state that a living person can have which is a sort of death. To me it partly sounds like spoiled people living on the expense of others, spoiled ones are not able to activate themselves, decide for themselves. It is something they have not learned to do, to think outside the box. They are not able to use brain of their own to invent a plan for them, invent new ways of being and doing. To be an alien in your own country sounds like someone who has committed a crime. They are committing crime against themselves most.

and what is normal. What is good life? Difference between revolution and evolution? Time space within, timeline, speed of time, to measure time, how is it spent, to spend time, spend it, time is not passing

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/ WHO