Risto Ahti (born 1943, see page 14) is the contemporary vates, the poet as seer or prophet, but he puts on the clown's motley as well.
     What is he a prophet of? Perhaps Jonah's desire to get out of the whale, or humanity's desire to get out of our constricting and protective conditioning. Like D.H. Lawrence he wants more life: to be truly alive we need to get lost, so we don't know whether we are coming or going, till we 'come in sight of ourselves and finally other people'.
     He writes like someone who has woken up in a brilliant lucid dream, which sleepers call reality, and now he can't get out of it. 'Listen!' he says. He is not talking to himself, he is talking urgently to the reader, as a needed companion. It is a dialogue, and the reader knows it and knows something is expected of him, something self-renewing. The reader is left to be creative, to solve the riddles and paradoxes that torment Ahti.
     Ahti's favourite form is the little narrative – a tale of miracle or foolishness, a surrealistic fantasy, a dream – fables and proverbs that suggest Sufi stories or Zen koans. He uses simple words and sentences; the complexity is in the mind-play, the wit, the spaces between non-sequiturs and the silence between sentences. He creates aphorisms effortlessly, almost proverbs: 'Children flattened at school can only speak as pages of a book.' His humour, though obviously a natural gift, is to disturb the reader into a defamiliarising look at the familiar. 'I said, The sun must have struck her face so strangely I remembered my own face's light'.
     But he is not superior to us, nor didactic. The persona dramatises his own dilemmas, using all the resources of playfulness to illuminate himself and us. He incorporates the opposite to what may be his main point: with thesis and antithesis he moves wittily and dialectically towards synthesis. Philosophically, like Blake, Coleridge and Yeats, he is basically a Berkeleyan (a philosopher who's not been disproved, only dismissed):

... and I've been there when my imagination has imagined
my reality as real.
And the rhythm of these imagined images is a new song,
and Beauty's there
where the eye gets its light.

But it has led him to a kind of agnostic mysticism, where his precise language plays around the imprecise boundaries of what can't be spoken. In an earlier book 'the unknown' even inserts himself impertinently between a couple of newly-weds having their first night together. The trouble is what we know, or think we know: 'When, at last, all the lamps have been shot out, it starts to be possible to see in the dark.'
     Mozart said his music was no more original than his nose, which was a profound remark, for every nose is different, like everybody's fingerprints. It is not all that easy to be oneself spiritually, or in art. Not every poet is a thinker, or an original thinker at any rate, alas. But the originality that is of any value is having and following and believing one's own nose – and reporting what one actually smells and sees. With Ahti one has the authentic feeling of poetry being reinvented, and one comes away refreshed.
     His laughter and caricature are door-openers. He would agree with John Donne that poetry is a serious, not a solemn thing. Bernard Shaw claimed he selected what he was most passionate about and then made it as funny as he could. Blake often did so too. It is a good way into a reader's or audience's subliminal mind but not always into the critic's respect; and there is a tendency for outstandingly original, extremely intelligent minds to be underrated for a while. But even before this, Ahti's twentieth volume, it had become clear to enough discriminating minds that he is one of the more interesting, top-rank poets.




Words of feeling by Risto Ahti | Contents 1/2002 | Home