Tytti Heikkinen - My type of poetry is search-engine based. I don't write "out of my own head" per se; instead, I pluck random text-mass from the Internet and form poems from it by recombining sentences and words. In a sense, my role in this process could be thought of as one of a cutter or director rather than of a traditional poet

Tytti Heikkinen, The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal

Every once in a while (ok, fairly often) I discover a work of (usually translated) poetry and it’s as if existence has propagated  a lawless fold in itself that allows itself to continuously redouble its awesomeness in a blithe bacterial repopulation of the world-gut with awesomeness.
That’s the experience I have (and the experience YOU will have, dear reader) while reading The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal by Tytti Heikkinen, trans. Niina Pollari (to debut from Action Books at AWP bookfair !). This book is brainy, rambunctious, gross and sad. The poems knit together the language of ‘where we are now’ until it reads like where we’ve never been and where we are always jailed up to be but maybe in a horni lady jail on planet future. At one moment this book is all limpid/lyric and slightly encrusted with dried goo–

I’ve found a stripper pen.
When you tilt it, the swimsuit slides away from the woman and reveals the body.
The picture is endless but placid, presents an argument
with a blackbird voice:
Best to know as little as possible at a time, so the transparent tube’s mystery remains intact.

–And the next moment the book is crooning in the voice of chat-room sybil Fatty XL, as in this poem, “Fatty-XL: Winter is Long:

Ihave great hair. Winter is long. today it didn’t snow or
sleet. I slept a lot and went outside
a little.
Yesterday had an evening with Eikka in the evening. He was like,
it’s pretty great how we’re constantly moving
into a direction without prejudice. It was really fun
but after twelve bottles (or cans…) don’t remember
the particulars. Before he left back
to basic) eikka wrote a note and asked me to show
it just to be sure at the pharmacy.
Brother’s hamster didn’t learn any new tricks.
Even mom says it knows one trick since it
hasn’t been castrated? I was confused?

Everything in this poem is totally ‘sic’, but the way. In this rambunctious scrum of surpluses and deficiencies and non-plusses and inefficiencies I feel the confusion? and infusion? and superfusion? of life-as-lived in a totally impurified language of the non-tribe splitting apart from itself and making new sad sexy clumps as with bed-head. Suck it, Eliot!
I love Fatty-XL, and the rest of Heikkenin’s work, and I think Niina Pollari is a goddess for bringing this into English for us, and Andrew Shuta (of Spork Press) made a great design with instructive diagrams, and everyone should read this book and buy it at the ACTION BOOKS TABLE at AWP. -  Joyelle McSweeney

The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal understands that if there is an essential self, it’s only the panic that the self will be decimated, lost, or mutilated in that wave of failure that follows all attempts to become less lonely. “Does a person even have life and if so, / then where between fetus / and a me-like political vacuum is the difference?” Maybe it’s in the gutter of the garbage mind, maybe it’s lodged in the tube that runs through each of us with a radio-chemical broadcast. It’s why I’m totally easy and often give it up just for stupid reasons, like for ex. if someone says my name. It’s why when I / crush on someone, I think about how I’m an AWFUL / FATTY smashing into them! Seriously I’m a terrible fatty. / Perverse. A Godzilla pig.
You do it, too, hollow fatties. And if you don’t, you bought the wrong kind of death.You searched the wrong engine. Heikkinen dials the right wrong number on her spirit phone, a cozy failure, bleeding out on Christmas Eve.- Danielle Pafunda

 

Poems by Tytti Heikkinen

Written by Tytti Heikkinen
Translated from the Finnish by Niina Pollari

A playground is an adult’s idea of childlike fun, loneliness the price paid for it. As a child I had a child’s existence. Bodily, objectively, I existed, undeniable, father listening to childish singing from over here, from the cell phone can, and mother, that rusted original nut all-powerful punctured tire yelling “You had better Crusoe not leave so that nobody has to be alone on Christmas.” When father returned, mother assumed the position in which the back touches the floor and her stomach hurt constantly from attempts to return to the original connection. Dreaming, I secretly wished I could become something else than a reaction method in a situation of fear, an obvious bride on the bed, sand in the mouth and finally invisibility and loneliness, that’s the biggest reason my own child was born. Its head still swung high in the end of the dilation period, then the falling from the edge and the fumbling, supposedly it makes the newborn lose all its social skills and shout publicly its first question: “Who is that stranger?” No consolation for mother’s hurts, no comic book band-aids, just a K-vitamin injection and later other injections, antibiotics, painkillers, tranquilizers and sleep disturbances, divorce, separation anxiety, deprivation, frozen fingers that even the rapidest imagination won’t melt. Because of the child, the house today is filled with Christmas decorations, but at some point in the night the loneliness will hit, and the only way to save us is unending want.
________________________________________
Cold song

Lee’s destiny: she was cheap and easy. She thought
to be a kind of substitute clean. She thought
like soap. Daily she stood without hurry
in the door’s mouth as people traveled by. Nightly she
enjoyed cheap wine. Soon she was completely messed up.
She wet herself with her finger, her well-progressing
birth, she listened to a message that was arriving,
she dressed it with words: the executionee is the events’
most important person, no matter how lowly.
          Outside a crow flew cawing into the universe,
the blind neighbor man remained unnaturally long
at the window, time was truly God’s metal
in the freeze, she rubbed herself hatefully, but
nothing would ever change and her bravery–
          Somewhere sighed. Did she hear singing or was it
wind? Once she had bought intravenous drugs
from a gypsy, a little before falling asleep she had had
a feeling, of making it through everything, she had had
a terrible hunger, she had left to seek food, she
had seen workers on smokebreak, she had yelled:
free lunches don’t exist and will never exist, she had ended up
under many lessons, she had gotten lost in hallways, she
had sneaked into her room, the radiator was on low and
the world so cold so cold, wearing night’s cold song.
Inspiration present, a nightingale singing musical-style
breathe frost, when bright when dim over the snow
through the sky, until dew sets, the cold sand’s
untouched surface.

________________________________________
II.

Sometimes she felt an internal loneliness.

She inched her underwear down and tied the key string
to her waist a little below the tan line. She
pulled on shiny pantyhose, then hid them
under dark straight pants. She put on a coat
to cover her humiliation and block her anger,
which made her tremble throughout, she wrapped
into it like a snow mantle, made from it a solidifying winter
symbol. She thought “She dressed her curse on
like her clothes.”
          She stepped outside and called a taxi. Bitter gall pushed
into her mouth.
	  She slipped carefully through the home door and hurried
to the bathroom. She slapped her face with cold
water and looked in the mirror: heavy evening makeup, cheeks
accented with sun powder, her style sense’s dark side.
	  She mixed oil into the bathwater, used it like
a metaphor for a ritual wash, which used to cleanse
the dead before. The voice in her head sounded now
clearer, many-sided, from it grew other
voices, clear, terrible and low, something deep that
she tried to close into the shower stall.
	  She dried herself. The towel smelled dusty but
warmed. It connected her to childhood, which
seemed now so immaterial.
	  She slept an hour and woke up tired.
She ate a sausage sandwich and brushed her teeth.
Then she remained looking cow-like ahead.
You understand. The soul is just a product, and she sensed
often, how it disappeared.

________________________________________

Seymour Saitzer

Seymour Saitzer wrote into his desk drawer.
His head he customarily kept in the upper drawer.
This way the sphere of the work was defined.

Seymour toyed with his pen. Once he sat
by his big glass windows, while at the same
time a truck sped down the interstate. He wrote:
"A truck speeds down the interstate. Wherefore goes the tar road,
Only the Lord road-knows…"

Seymour Saitzer didn’t have a wife. The loyal
Nehljudof kept all his domestic affairs.

Seymour laughed when I arrived to borrow
a book from him. He rose from his wheelchair and said:
"Bruno Gröning. Every book begins with words."
Then he exited and left me on the threshold 

standing. I could hear only quiet moaning
behind the WC door. I thought about how luckily
I was neither old nor alone. 

Sometimes Seymour circulated in restaurants just
like he knew he couldn’t join conversations.
Then he sat at the table by the window,
looked absently at the road and with one move his glass
emptied. I still remember well how he sat,
face pale, fingers pushed into the ears.
I sat smoking on the next balcony
a short distance from the corner of L and watched
him. The day’s paper rested on the table’s white
surface.

But this was long before the great bloodbath.

_____________________________________
Brains Escape Far Away

Brains control our motions, fill
the horizon to its brims.
Muscular, air-inflated brains,
neuronal marriers of the micro- and macrocosm
perfect gods
dense and serious in a way that doesn’t fall for cheap
effects, like the heart or IBM.

Today my brains began to wither away.
I no longer recall multiplication tables or what I used to read.
My brains melt
my brains melt
and two suited men arrive at the coat check.
Thanks everyone for yesterday,
don’t feel bad.
Brains just escape far away,
yep, yep
they need a lot of nourishment
they ate 13,000 rolls and now they feel lazy.

Will we have reality or rest and dreaming?
Brains don’t separate the real from the phantom pain,
so there is no “knowledge,”
no heaven divisible by ten,
d’apres moi and bye-bye.

Luckily it’s already evening like we know
we know it.

_____________________________________
The Fountain of Statistic
Where the left-behind, there night. Count all
the falling tiles: their ability to throw themselves supposes
an extraordinarily clever support structure.
Water is a diminutive exchange of gases
in the river, lost also. The smallest flame in this
environment would be extravagant.
Imagination has a self-illuminating aura,
grandiose perhaps, but borrowed all
the same. Foreplay’s purpose is to ascertain
that nobody flees. That’s why I like
your touch, it’s like I’m assembling myself
again.
Do you find something in this with which
to agree? When the varnish gets
to melting a little, we have a lot
to hold on to. Don’t fret, it’s easy to lose
your way, the equator does shift.
And nobody else gets an encore, those weren’t reserved
for the chorus.

Tytti Heikkinen (Transl. Niina Pollari)
Contributor's note My name is Tytti Heikkinen, and I'm a Finnish female poet. My type of poetry is search-engine based. I don't write "out of my own head" per se; instead, I pluck random text-mass from the Internet and form poems from it by recombining sentences and words. In a sense, my role in this process could be thought of as one of a cutter or director rather than of a traditional poet. My first collection, Täytetyn eläimen lämpö (Taxidermied Animal's Warmth), was published in Finland in February 2008.
This issue will publish poems from my upcoming collection. They belong to the so-called "Fatty-XL" series, which contains search-engine generated flarf poems. As many readers know, flarf poems consciously use low language and bad taste to their advantage. In my own poems, I tend to combine the flarf aesthetic with my own easygoing and often narrative style. These poems can be said to belong to a new tradition of European feminism, among whose representatives I count the German novelist Charlotte Roche, whose novel Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands, upcoming in English in 2009) uses a low-culture style in its own way and to its own advantage. This type of 'worsening-feminism' can be seen as a kind of protest and matricide in comparison to a tradition of extremely aesthetic, transparent women's writing. Among my own interests is language that differs from the highly polished, crystalline women's writing that in its ultimately finished state feels sometimes almost masochistic: we polish and polish, until the text burns up all its oxygen, all its life. It's freeing to do something completely different. Fatty XL
I DON'T GET IT


I don get how people's minds move.
Like why Leena even dragged Ake there with her. .Like I could
say that it was her own fault what happened happened.
NowI llllove you Ake!!!!!!!! Oh I ripped apart when he said GOD I AM
A BADASS!!!!! Everyone says "lol he's a dork" and I know
it too it's just he's such a <3 .="" br="" i="" m="" mainly="" to="" trying=""> express that I'm fed up with being single I get from it a kind of
empty feeling.. let's talk about positions right away.Yeah I don't get it. ..
body movement. trackback. Probably everyone knows sixtynine;
but who has actually tried? Difficult say
I. And 5 minutes was more than(more than pois) enough. For a long time.
Mom's afraid I'll get some STD . I don't get what
there's to fear. I said I don't get either how someone could
look at old bitchs like that with elephant cunts.
Well yea ok..
I've been told that no dude is interested in me.
I don't know a lot about sex or dating, cause nobody has actually
ever explained them to Me, I have had to try to find them in books myself.
gotta laugh... .Am I stupid cause I don't get generally what's going on
scramble 'subjects' and 'objects' and who gave to whom and when?
Fatty XL
ANAL SEX THROUGHOUT THE AGES
Today I've been doing all kinds of stuff here at work, ex. reading
about anal sex on the internet:
"Anal sex has been common throughout the ages.
Today's young people
believe anal sex is not an extreme sport, but totally
natural and
belongs in a lifelong relationship. We're not talking about normal
vaginal sex. Less commonly we mean asshole
sex.."
Oh uh OH. personally I Don't necessarily recommend anal sex
to anyone., and I know exactly what I'm talking about, because the Super
tried it once with me. He said "Ok say camel when it starts
to walk" and got going. but it didn't work, it hurt too much . ..
then I Though, thatI don't really like older men anymore
if they're all like that!!!
**
... oh whoops. .. ..my bosses just arrived when I continueD
surfing..
Huh. Pretty bad surprise.
I asked since I couldn't think of what to say .. do you by any chance
practice anal sex or oral sex since you're now both pregnant?
They said "What a stupid thing to say" and the other one was like :
"BTW you forgot to inform your employers of your criminal past."
..!!!
Huh! A lot for a morning! Thank god soon it's
lunchtime!

Fatty XL
LIFE'S A BITCH UNTIL YOU DIE

OK OK now I'm going to say some stupid thi1ng!
But first: I want to superthank my friend Niina she asked me
to spend valentines day with her. .. was fun!!! there was arsi
and Ville , sami, ari, jukka and Hannu and some Jossu.
I don't really like Jossu kind of a slut and drunk totally saying
SUCH stupid things that you suffer listening Mad. But,
I know how I'm also totally easy and often give just
for stupid reasons, like for ex. if someone says my name.
    At the end of the night Jukka asked me over to continue .. he asked my place or
yours. Like oh hell. That kind of thing was cool
maybe like in the 1980s but now .. completely wrong dichotomy, say
I. But we went anyway.
That guy has enough hair! And he has a stomach too and strange
stuff, like for ex. when he introduced his testicles: Walrus and Super
Walrus. . like goddamn that man says such STUPID
things!!! Then again we've seen stupider guys, at least in Lahti,
and I'm not denying that he's my only Big Dick Friend.
But I Can't Stand that he's always doing those thumb things! and now
he's introducing like the start of some acrobatics (using lotion)
which I also kind of don't like....then he yelled
THE WHOLE TIME like hallelujah.,let there be light
For the people .. and something else for the people.
He managed to continue with me almost too long, I myself maintained just
for a moment the same mixing speed. I tried to think of some
positive aspects, like "the more I give the more
I will receive"...yea whatever. Despite my busy concentration
I fell asleep. In my dream I had long, light hair and I picked
flowers in a meadow.
    In the morning I decided to leave through the back. pretty thirsty..and
a massive selfdestructive feeling. Everything felt meaningless,
exhausting and insignificant.: Reality felt mostly like a performance
lacking something better, and with a plot that's occasionally
pretty seriously lost.
Hmn... in a certain development of decay it's possible to achieve such
a state ,that most people will never be able to recognize
these signs.

Contemporary Concrete Poetry

Written by Tytti Heikkinen http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/files/CCP.swf