In the Cut, in English, in Finnish, in ImageS

Satu Kaikkonen, "cu;t" (1 April 2015)

Satu Kaikkonen recreates the history of poetry in the process of making her poems and pwoermds, in the process of making herself. She has an eye for language. The ear comes later.

You can see it in her "cu;t," where the poem is severlated, where the semi-colon (half colon, half comma) is the tmetic break that defines the word, the single syllable, the 2.5 letters.

A word is merely the meaning of itself. And the gauze that holds it.

Filled with language (as the Finns often are--a people whose language has no native f though most people know them by their f beginning, the f-stop, how they focus and make), she makes a pwoermd in English, as if the sound of a Norman invasion:

argotguable

The slang of the pwoermd swallowing the t, silent against the alveolar ridge, the voice of discord (dischord), looking almost of the tongue, yet tumbling through sounds and silences: guage (the measurement of it).

Or she breaks into Finnish (a song of concatenation, a language of such agglutinative variety and power that a word can be made like a brick wall, to grow until the bricks run out):

pääskykipu

She swallows the pain of the word, the thought, the sun, the world as it comes to us hard and fast, but slipping away. To hold it, to remember, to keep thought as a human machine does, she must (we must) swallow it, not so the pain goes away, but so we can remember it, so we can feel alive from the pain of the truth of pain. All done in a word with hard and brittle sounds, ones few anglophones can read from the sequence of the letters that make it.

The pwoermd, still, is the word more than the sound (the word more than the letter, the symbol, the thought). The word.

And she does this all with languages she loves (Finnish, English, Images), "with languages i love."

pw(o’er)md