Beat Poetry in Finland in the 1960s

Résumé En

The poem had been introduced to Finland in a partial translation in 1959. Firstly, the appropriation of Beat literature in Finland has to be related to the internal evolution of the literary field of the country and especially to discussions of poetic discourse and the role of the poet. Among the Finnish poets, Anselm Hollo had the closest ties with American Beat authors. This creative appropriation and interpretation of Beat is particularly striking in the poem "Superman as Child". Superman in this respect is to be compared with the Prince Valiant, Heracles, and Ulysses mentioned later in the poem. The shared sense of restlessness driven by desire and/or despair and so characteristic of Beat as mapped by Ginsberg, here is adapted to Kejonen's own life and world. In "Divine Comedy I", Into attacks hypocrisy and sense of captivity that characterize the "system".ORCommenting on Pekka Kejonen’s poem “Other Howl” (“Toinen huuto,” 1965), Jorma Korpela, acclaimed modernist author and the then 22-year-old Kejonen’s mentor in literature, said he had never imagined someone so young could suffer so much (Kejonen 1994: 51). Reading Kejonen’s debut work Jam Session (Jamit, 1963), a collection of joyful and witty stories of young jazz musicians and teenagers in a provincial town in Finland during the late 1950s and early 1960s, one may indeed wonder whether life was as hard as depicted in the poem. It is true however, that the author was in permanent conflict with the authorities of his time, consuming alcohol and Pervitin—a methamphetamine used by the Finnish army during the war—in big quantities and living a restless bohemian life in the grey zone between literary salons and the gutter. He spent long periods in hospitals and asylums in forced rehabilitation before quitting drinking and drugs definitively in the 1970s. It is no wonder that Ginsberg’s “Howl,” characterized by Christopher Gair as “probably the best-known countercultural assault on the stultifying destruction of the individual by authoritarian surveillance and control” (Gair 2008: 71) and by Marjorie Perloff as having a sense of “displaced violence” (Perloff 2006: 41) at its core, intrigued Kejonen to the point that he appropriated it in his own work.