Satu Kaikkonen

After I made my first few vispos in 2006, I saw an article in Valo, a supplement of the Finnish daily newspaper, Aamulehti, and the ideas from the article remained in my mind. I had already, for quite some time, wanted to do something other than just write plaintext poems, so I went looking to find additional information about “nurous” which was the term for the visual poetry in the article.

I searched for “nurous” and found Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s and Karri Kokkos’s blogs (I looked for information in Finnish). After that I found the site nocturno.org.

Now I explore all different kinds of artistic and typographical terrain: I write poems in Finnish (and in English and Swedish); I make pwoermds, unilanguage, asemics, vispos, collaborations with others, colors art, lettervispos, abstract/visual comics, marquee poems, sound poems, animated vispos, animated abstract/visual comics, poemicstrips, and I even compose little songs. — Satu Kaikkonen

A Is Dressing Up (for Gary Barwin), 2013	Disdiscussion, 2014	Ghost Chairs 9, 2014
Isoäiti, 2011	Secrets Key 2, 2014	Sun Eater, 2014
The Author of All, 2014	The House of the Soul, 2014	The Reindeer Act 1, 2014
The Tales of Baabel 2, 2014

February 15, 2016

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About this feature

Nico Vassilakis returns to Jacket2 with a new feature on the current state of visual poetry in Finland. “There’s a stir going on, a textual free-for-all, a visible shift in how language is being handled in response to the machines in our lives,” he notes. “In Finland, visual poetry, in some way, sprang up almost fully formed. There are few antecedents that point to its appearance, yet here it is. The fully mature mingle with the nascent and in so doing form a new constellation of visual poetries.”

The ten poets included here — Cia Rinne, J. P. Sipilä, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mari Laaksonen, Mikko Kuorinki, Reijo Valta, Sami Liuhto, Satu Kaikkonen, Tero Hannula, and Tiina Lehikoinen — reflect the potential of a close-knit Finnish scene, yet find diverse solutions to their own aesthetic dilemmas, producing “strong, flexible, and stunning work” in the process. In Vassilakis’ estimation, they’ve created “a visual poetry platform from which future poets can embark on a Finnish vispo experience.”

Preface

Nico Vassilakis

Featuring contributions from: Cia Rinne, J. P. Sipilä, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mari Laaksonen, Mikko Kuorinki, Reijo Valta, Sami Liuhto, Satu Kaikkonen, Tero Hannula, and Tiina Lehikoinen.

Edited by Nico Vassilakis

Satu Kaikkonen