Jyrki Kiiskinen

I have been studying satellite images of the Saari Residence on my living room sofa, planning my running routes and searching the map for dead ends that afford a view of the sea. Inevitably, I have also imagined what this corner of the world looks like and what it sounds like during the autumn’s bird migration and where I might find what few mushrooms there may be this autumn. 

In this, as yet unreal, landscape I will spend two months working on my collection of poems. 

I write prosaic poems in the third person which are slightly tragicomic and have capricious sentence structures. The protagonist in them is a certain Kiiskinen. He is a nondescript and estranged middle-class person living an absurd life, while the world’s upheavals carry on happening around him. 

At the bottom of the script, I have drafted another element, like the ribbon of text highlighting the headlines that runs at the bottom of the TV screen during a news broadcast. This river of text, filled with the world’s upheavals, meanders here and there, swallowing a great many ingredients and inevitably landing as the backdrop to Kiiskinen’s life. 

Poetry forces you to pose questions and it didn’t fail to do so this time either: Do an individual’s small life and the great philosophical questions fit into the same picture? How could an individual become connected to the world and feel like a significant part of it? Are meanings created within an individual’s closed inner world, or do they arise out of lightning-quick relations with the outside world? How does Kiiskinen birth his own humanity? It remains to be seen whether I will find some answers at the Saari Residence, or whether new questions come up.