New & Up

June 26, 2008 9:23 PM Back - and away. After a long hiatus here (of which perhaps more later: at least I now know that one can grow addicted to being offline also), I've started gradually to mount my site on a new server and platform. I already started to blog there, so why don't take a look at it in this temporary address.

Selected Previous Entries

June 20, 2007 9:08 AM My "Afterword" to Kuuskajaskari, in English, here.

June 19, 2007 11:58 PM New from ntamo: Kuuskajaskari by Jyrki Pellinen, a seminal work of Finnish Modernist poetry, original Finnish publication 1964, now together with an English translation, Afterword, and Notes by me; Anteckningar från grannlandet by Janna Kantola, essays in Swedish on translation of and by Gunnar Ekelöf, James Joyce, Henri Michaux, and Pentti Saarikoski.

May 17, 2007 8:22 AM Martin Johs. Møller has put a recording of my reading of "Sanasade" (Word Rain) in Biskops-Arnö up at his play list (the black "Oplæsninger fra FLY" box down right). I'd say in my latest renderings, the piece has entered its proto-expressionist phase (you may want to have patience to listen up to the very end). There's still a lot of ground to cover and things to learn in that automatically generated procedural poem; in Prague, I was almost moved when a young Czech woman told me, "First I thought it was about sex, then I realized no, it's about getting old..." (For an earlier recording, from Oct. 2005, click here; for my "Sound Work" page, here.)

January 29, 2007 6:52 PM "Yhä uudestaan ikävyyden ympär'" is the titel I gave to the Finnish version of my essay, "Plurifying the Languages of the Trite" - a piece that, according to Prof. Aurora F. Bernardini, "curiosamente, vêm inicialmente atualizar dois dos mais conhecidos textos ocidentais sobre poesia, o de Heidegger (1916) sobre a essência da poesia e o de Benjamin (1915) sobre dois poemas de Hölderlin" (see prof. Bernardini's commentary at the Centopeia web site (section Ensaios)).

January 14, 2007 9:58 AM Janne Nummela, the author of Lyhyellä matkalla ohuesti jäätyneen meren yli (an important book of mostly "Google based" poems, one of which, in my translation into English, is up here), has written a long (and winding) review of Runouden puolustus (A Defence of Poetry), a Finnish volume of poems and essays by Charles Bernstein, edited and co-translated by me; in its original Finnish, the review is over there.

December 4, 2006 8:37 PM You can now buy Lake Onega and Other Poems online (£7.99, $13.56).

December 4, 2006 11:45 AM I was invited to give one of the two "Writer's Comments" in an expert seminar on "Writers' Copyrights" organized by the Literary Council of Finland, last Thursday (the other commentator was the Art Professor, novelist Olli Jalonen). Here's what I had to say: in Finnish, and in my quick English translation.

November 28, 2006 7:30 PM Unpublished endorsement: "In a body of work at once droll and immensely moving, Leevi Lehto 'gets things right side upside down' in the variety of poetic jumping beans put in play, as if to speak at all meant taking on a rack of billiard balls coagulated in space without a table in sight. Some of the inducements of Language poetry might suggest that the authors were not native speakers. Not true, but such opportunity is now disclosed-not as legacy, but as primal swerve. And, like a boomerang, it can carom mischievously back on itself, as in the occasional pastiche of imperfectly crafted idiomatic English ("The Finnish Communists in Eastern Karelia"). The delectations of the notes invite another round of gourmandizing for English readers, who will find themselves plunged serendipitously into the haunted precincts of things Finnish, a land as remote as Middle Earth yet, like Frodo's habitat, strangely proximate to everything you think you know. Lake Onega and Other Poems is a captivating document of inter-lingual poetics mapping a future that will increasingly be where poetry happens." - Jed Rasula

November 23, 2006 17:15 PM I've started to work as the editor of the new Scandinavian Portal of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC). It's still in its early stages of development (I hope), but already worth of taking a look at (I think).

October 26, 2006 11:50 AM Unpublished endorsement: "Leevi Lehto's native language is Finnish, but these poems in English are by no means mere self-translations. Expert translator and linguist, sonneteer, found-text artist, prose poet, post-structuralist theorist, and, perhaps most notably, inventor of digital poetic text, Lehto is consistently amazing, brilliant - and funny. Ranging from his early 'imagist' lyric to his Google Poem Generator of recent years, Lake Onega and Other Poems displays an inventiveness and imagination that ushers in a new transnational poetics." - Marjorie Perloff

October 6, 2006 6:03 PM Stuff from the August Helsinki Poetics Conference now available online at Tuli&Savu Net. In particular, you may want to check Jesper Olsson on tradition in the context of concret and digital poetry, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' excellent outsider take on Haavikko (of One And Twenty, soon to come out in Anselm Hollo's translation).

October 5, 2006 3:03 PM Bem outra eternidade! Fragments from my 1991 - "lyrically noble" (Risto Ahti) - book Ihan toinen iankaikkisuus (Quite Another Eternity) in translation into Portuguese by Régis Bonvicino.

July 12, 2006 7:10 PM Another look at my traffic tracking service data brought up this poem.

July 10, 2006 6:51 AM "Miksi miestä täällä kaikkialla kaatuu / kuin heinää..." My "'Futebol' Poems" (in Finnish), from "Jalkataidepallo", an "alternative" report on the FIFA World Cup final match, June 9, 2006.

June 28, 2006 1:10 PM. "Aus dem Wortspiel der Information", a new, long, visual poem by me.

For all previous entires, see Archive, aka my pseudo blog.

Poesia em Tempo de Guerra e Banalidade. Encontro Internacional de Poesia in Sao Paolo, Brazil, May-June 2006, curated by Régis Bonvicino and Alcir Pécora. Read more (in Portuguese). Proposal for the seminar in English

Information of my upcoming book in English, Lake Onega and Other Poems (Salt Publishing, September 2006).

Special Guest of the Month (of November 2005): Jyrki Pellinen.

Listen to my reading of "Elegia" (mp3, 1,94 MB, 3:24) and "Sanasade" (mp3, 6,3 MB, 10:47), and to Microsoft Mike's fresh performance on my "Of the Help Her Art". All audio files.

It's Nothing! Reflexions on the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, with an emphasis on The Weather (2005)

On zaroum by Cia Rinne

Four early political essays (1980-85) (Finnish).

Bloomsday! My Ulysses translation project page updated June 24, 2005. Read more F

Varjot korvissamme (Shadows in the Ear) My essay (F) on translating poetry, from Suom.huom. (N,F), ed. Kristiina Rikman, WSOY 2005.

Seitkytluku / The Finnish 70's NKP ja mä / CPSU and I

Karri Kokko: Shadow Finlandia: First 134 entries in English translation.

On Jackson Mac Low: Finnish, English.

Interview with Charles Bernstein (1993): Finnish, English.

Poesi vs. romantisk ideologi. Poetry Vs. Romantic Ideology, my conversation, S with Fredrik Hertzberg, from OEI #13 /2003. Suomeksi täällä, F

Text for my talk at Pennsylvania University, Feb. 23, 2005 With recordings from Kelly Writer's House, and with Microsoft Sam reading Hellaakoski's "Hauen laulu" / "The Pike's Song".

"renessanssi @ www.leevilehto.net" Kuisma Korhonen on ��ninen, F

In Jacket 22: My poem sequence Coupons Will Remember. The "same" in Finnish here.