Poems
Carlos Lievonen: Only stamens. Big Dipper. 94 pp.
What the more the world is full of useless everyday nonsense, the more meaningful I find reading poetry. When people think they’re being sharp and spiky online, in reality, the possibilities of language are flowing from their fingers to the keyboard in a pitiful trickle.
It’s good for those who haven’t had to touch the internet. For those of us who have touched this darkness, the linguistic refuge is found in poetry, where words form a world of untamed possibilities without a suffocating power.
Carlos Lievonen (b. 1992) in the first book Just stamens it’s specifically about a place that two lovers create for their own safety.
Classic the three-part poem begins with a ward Locus amoenuswhich means an ideal landscape, an idyll, a downright utopian state. The Latin term offers a reading guide and a horizon of expectation that always takes you to the literature and myths of antiquity; Locus amoenus is thus a promise of a dialogue between the modern and the ancient, from pastorals to contemporary poetry.
What wonderful space has already been recorded in the early murals? The euphoria of sex.
Just stamens is a highly homoerotically charged poem, two lovers’ inebriated drug, which moves with a seductive charm: “We are about to end our fast. / We spooned each other.”
The Silmänisks that lead to the queer and homoerotic lecture are big gestures: the island of Lesvos, Sappho, Oscar Wilde and Liberace among other things should be mentioned. The name of the second department is Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet Proust not mentioned by name!
Lievonen makes use of 19th century romanticism and its sincere pathos. At every moment, however, I’m not sure if Lievonen himself is sincere in his neo-romanticism – and if there is a purpose – when the means sometimes seem unnecessarily suggestive, and in some places the forced density of metaphors consumes too much oxygen in the growth of the work.
That’s when you feel like moving the leaves that protect the bark out of the way and whispering behind them, right at the root: just boldly write your own world.
Although the immaturity characteristic of a debut book is visible in places, it mostly manages to be an attractive feature, because the work is ultimately a beautifully typed language and a controlled whole. Gone are the individual awkwardnesses like “phallic shadows of the pine”.
“
Just boldly write your own world.
Certain stylistic errors that deviate from the lofty expression are more clearly thought out and surprising: “Only real hints on the shelves, not the only babbling poet boy.”
Obvious I was especially impressed with the awakenings of the first department Erkka Filanderin The white storm of awakening (2013). They don’t even try to hide this. Just stamens feels specifically calling itself to the same neo-romantic crackers sleepless delirium with desire.
The last part of the work is still titled Stormalthough in this case the reference is primarily to Shakespeare’s to the play, to the breaking of the ideal state and its threat.
Lievonen has a master’s degree in theoretical philosophy and also works as a critic. You can read his criticisms in domestic cultural magazines, such as Nuoresta Voima. Lievos has previously published a publication of the Poesiavihkot series Holorefraction (2022). Together, the works present a very promising author to the field of domestic contemporary poetry.
Romantic the influence of time has started to seep here and there into pop culture.
I still don’t read Just stamens not as part of any trend phenomenon, but as a curious desire to make my own composition from the much-read and used images of nature, myths and eroticism; a desire to stick to tradition before anything else. Perhaps the calm before the storm?
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