Diane Jarvenpa, Poet: The Way She Told Her Story

I wrote this blurb for this forthcoming book of poems:

From the land of the midnight sun, deep forests, and rye fields comes a girl, a shape-shifter. In The Way She Told Her Story, Diane Jarvenpa explores Finnish women's history, immigrant stories, and the mother/daughter terrain: "...a shifting place/ not a country/ more a continent with moving borders." These poems were forged in the context of the Finnish Kalevala and also another text of the same era, a collection of ancient runes sung primarily by women, the Kanteletar. Jarvenpa comes to poetry through song, and through her own mother, poet Aili Jarvenpa. She has searched archives and found forgotten stories breathing with life, and she has blended these with her own. In one poem, a grandmother smokes a pipe and says, "in the center of the heart/ is a lie and a truth." This might be true of all women's stories. Past the stereotype of women who tend the home, marry and bear children and past the stereotypes of those women that refuse the domestic roles, we glimpse the true ways that women create their lives and their communities. The women in these poems are witches, mothers, housekeepers, artists, journalists, vagabonds, and revolutionaries. Genealogy is here, but also "an inheritance of common things" that transforms into a new language of lyric, script, potter's wheel, poetry, and flight. The immigrant undergoes difficult passage. It takes courage to leave everything behind to enter a new landscape and a new language. This is a testament to creativity and resilience that this poet puts in the reader's hand. I love this book! Diane Jarvenpa, like her poem The Rune Singer, "sleeps a different breath of notes/ until dawn is strewn with magpies." (Publisher: New Rivers Press (scheduled for late November 2017) ISBN-13: 978-0898233667

--Sheila Packa
former Duluth Poet Laureate
author of Night Train Red Dust and Cloud Birds

About Diane Jarvi's album of kantele music, Bittersweet.

“Bittersweet is a fusion sound and a melding of both Finnish and American folk traditions; the album embodies both musical landscapes. Jarvi has taken the Nordic sound and also brought it into American folk, sometimes evoking mountain music and café accordion sound. Her voice is resonant, rich, and she uses it like an instrument. Many (but not all) of the lyrics are in Finnish, and this lends an aching and beautiful element. Her skills as a poet are also present in her music. She evokes the flight of a sea bird and sparrow and the feeling of wandering in the first snow amid falling stars. Even if one does not follow the exact words, her expressive voice carries the meaning. There is a mystery that she weaves from the landscape, the sounds, and the stories. Buy this album. Not only will you support this strong musical and poetic voice, you will cross untravelled regions of your soul and be glad for the journey.” -Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish –New World Finn

See her website https://dianejarvi.com/

Born to Write

Thank you to the Finnish American Reporter for this article!

If language is a river, then I swam in two rivers. My grandparents were born in the Ostrobothnian region in western Finland. My parents were bilingual, and spoke English and Finnish. The language was not a barrier. For me, it was part of the music. There was a lot that was never translated that I learned at a level subliminal or physical. It's no surprise that I'm obsessed with languages.  

Finnish was the adult language, the language of secrets. In my family, it was also the language of the inebriated. English was the broken language, the official language of which my parents insisted the children should all master. It was necessary for groceries, schools, doctors, and offices. It was NBC, CBS, and ABC.

I was strongly influenced by the women in my family and their stories. My grandparents disembarked from Hänko, Finland. Ahead of my paternal grandmother was a house to be built and a few months after, a fire that burned it down.  Ahead of my maternal grandmother waited eleven children to bear and a few she had to bury. The last child she delivered herself.  

My parents had many siblings, and they loved music and dancing. My aunt Martha, who lived next door, was a naturalist and visual artist. My younger sister designs clothing, and my older sister built her own house and raised horses. Many of my aunts and uncles played accordions. The bellows of an accordion sound like breathing. Family visits were like big reunions, held often. But now my parents have passed on, and so have many of my aunts and uncles. Life is much more quiet!

I grew up in a working class family on the Iron Range in Minnesota. We lived on the Vermilion Trail, a century old route near the St Louis River, Lake Esquagama, Silver Lake and Bass Lake. I had no idea of the history of this place until recently. Our home was also in the midst of iron and taconite mines. My father was a heavy equipment operator, and my older sister was a train engineer for a mining company. I spent one summer in college working as a laborer at Minntac.  Of the Iron Range, I say: Whiskey was a life waiting for somebody to marry it.

I value my immersion in Finnish culture.  When I met relatives in Finland, I noticed two characteristics that I've come to consider particularly Finnish: quiet attentiveness and acceptance. As a writer, it's been helpful to be a good observer, to be receptive, and to be able work skillfully with the things at hand.  My mother's cousin MIkko Himanka in Kokkola, Finland is a writer of local history.  His father died before he was born, and he has dedicated his time to recording the stories of war orphans.  

I was reared beneath Norway Pines. I think of them as my clan: tall with strong trunks and long and buoyant limbs. What I mean by this is that people are not separate from the landscape. The patterns and events in nature occur also in human experience: river flow, migrations, floods, or lightning strikes. As a child who loved to swim, I wasn't just moving in the water, but water was moving in me. I'm interested in the correspondences here. Our body is also the body of earth. History is the accumulation of stories, generation after generation, similar to layers of sediment and compost. We walk on our history. We take our harvest from it, and we bury our dead in it.  One more thing: bears. I see bears a lot, and I dream about bears. Maybe they are magic.

Good Finnish design uses natural materials in an inventive and economic way.  I seek to achieve this in my own work. This not always about adding things. It's also about knowing what to omit. Art and writing is the ability to make something from nothing, using any materials. As a writer, it's quite satisfying to invent a form and find correspondences.  There's a pattern, and it's the job of artists and writers to reveal it.

Roots & Landscape

What do your roots have to do with what you write? Find contemporary poets from the country or place of your ancestors and consider the connections: image, metaphor, word choice, world view. Language transmits culture in so many ways and even as language changes, culture comes through.

My grandparents on both sides immigrated from Finland, so I’m third generation. My roots are strongly in the Finnish culture. I grew up around the language, my grandparents spoke Finnish almost exclusively and my parents spoke Finnish fluently. I had an aunt and uncle who married Finnish immigrants and this kept the language even more strong. However, I didn't learn Finnish. My mother, so determined to be an American, didn't want an accent. We spoke English. But Finnish culture is still present in every other way.

When I went looking for contemporary poets, I found a collection of women poets called Enchanting Beasts, edited and translated by Kirsti Simonsuuri. It was published by Forest Books in 1990. In the introduction, Simonsuuri eloquently examines the diversity and links Finnish poets in that volume, referring to “mythical darkness…invisible dimensions…poets of language…lyrical, imagistic space filled with forests, water, winds, and the eternal movement within.” Poets of any culture may find themselves exploring all of these, but her words draw me into that circle and I’m very pleased to be there. You can find portions of the text online at http://www.nuorenvoimanliitto.fi/beasts

Poets have so many influences. Heritage is important as are many other things. It happens that the landscape I grew up in, in northern Minnesota, is similar to that of Finland. The landscape that I live in now is still the same—indelible it is in me.