A Suitcase full of Snowflakes
a study of J.P. Virtanen’s ‘Eight Hundred and Fifty-Three Scenes’.


Any critical appraisal of a body of poetry often illuminates the character and the technique of the critic more than the poet. This study of Virtanen’s collection is not supported by any of the poet’s essays or criticism. I hope any misunderstandings on my part will be pointed out by the poet.

Eight Hundred and Fifty-Three Scenes is an interesting title for a collection which does not take the image, the still image or the cinematic scene as the starting point for the majority of its content. Instead, there are interior monologues and imagined conversations, a predominantly non-visual dramatic form often approaching a modern soliloquy. Much of this drama is concerned with the fear of losing an idea, of not effectively capturing a moment before it is lost forever. The epigraph from Diderot which begins the collection (“Great thoughts stir within me at the sight of ruins”) goes a way towards explicating the psychological and philosophical problem that vexes Virtanen. His inspiration for the main of this volume comes from the angst generated by a fear of decay, of forgetting, of leaving behind. His role, once inspired, is to “walk to Paris, bearing a snowflake” (‘To Pantheon and Back’) in the hope that the idea will still be complete and coherent by the time he finds a place to sit and write it down. All writers of poetry will feel a strong affinity with the violin player who ends up “plucking through recollections of a muffled sound” (‘Violin Concerto – Allegro Moderato’). When inspired, the poet must “make it on stage before / the lights/ take a bow and then blow out” (‘Opening Night’) and he is left hanging, without a word to say, the idea forgotten, the courage and inspiration gone, staring at the blank page, which like an audience, stares back, fiercely.

‘Dirt Roads’, which appears immediately after ‘To Pantheon and Back’, serves as a companion piece. ‘Patheon’ concerns not only the germ of memory-angst, but also the lineage a modern poet must acknowledge; the roles the poet must play (the exemplary Poundian dandy “in the gazebo / forming blackbirds / out of cigar smoke”) in order not just to be taken seriously, but to be able to take himself seriously; and the artistic and social martyrdom of being a modern poet (in which acceptance and success are slightly vulgar, and insufferable). ‘Dirt Roads’ deals with the weight not of the freshly-spawned idea that must desperately be conserved, but the weight a poet is already under, the weight that is there ab ovo. The traveller here is weighed down by his own ambition, his “face fashioned as a bold king of old” which he calls, so that we may recognise that this is a classical marble head, his “white weight”. This is earlier described – before its metamorphosis into the Hieratic Head – as luggage rescued from a recent failed venture. To read ‘Dirt Roads’ as a narrative, which I believe it to be (though of the sort which is driven by a confused set of voices which argue until one wins out and a conclusion is reached), is to read it as a philosophical piece about the role of ambition, and the trouble with trying too hard. The traveller emerges from the wreck of his failure with high-minded ambitions intact, only to realise, with the prospect of another failure staring him in the face, that he can only progress as an artist if he achieves a sort of disinterested freedom; this is one of the complex theories which appear throughout the collection, and requires some exploration. ‘Dirt Roads’ is about the conflict between the all-possessing, vivid and ego-annihilating ‘vision’, that poetical complex which can trigger an artist to produce art, and the poet’s rigorous self-perception and aims (the agonies of self-perception, the angst of how we are perceived by others, figures in ‘Useless Ruse’: without his “golden robes” the poet is worried that he will not be recognised as a poet. This is the trouble with reticence, or lack of ebullience in an artist). It is troubling for a poet of serious character, who seeks to set himself up in the canon alongside and not prostrate before his mentors, to find that a good poem he has just produced is in conflict with the sort of poetry he feels he should be writing, or at least does not fit to his rigorously thought-out theory. To use a musical analogy, we might think of Nico’s distress at not being able to sing like Bob Dylan.

The traveller in ‘Dirt Roads’ runs the risk of suffering the fate of Sisyphus (Virtanen explores this affinity more particularly in ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’). He finds himself on “Titanic’s trail – never to cross the vale, / but sink in the stream”. We know already that he emerged with his luggage “from the sunken Titanic” at the start of the poem; if he is to break from the circular doom, he must surrender to his inspiration.

The vale, which represents the visionary world (as real in the mind of the poet as the outside, physical) reveals itself as intangible, as a ‘vision’, in the way that it overlaps with the dusty, dry territory of the road. The section reads


I think here of the starets in Dostoevsky, who achieves a higher state of consciousness through physical strain and extreme discomfort. There is also the analogy of the monk, flogging himself to get closer to God. Reading the section closely, we see that although the traveller has “reached the vale”, he is still “dripping drops” of sweat “down the road and on the miles”; his head is in the vale, his body is still (mark the use of the present tense in the lines) on the road, sweating with the exertion.

From a philosophical point of view, Virtanen’s ability to ‘hear’ or ‘see’ things which he could not, link to his concept of ‘baggage’: the brain processes data which the senses have not perceived, based on certain other stimuli. For instance, in ‘Across the Road I Saw’, the poet lists, in amongst the visual data, “joyous laughter”. To be pedantic, he might see the mouths moving, but he would not be able to see what is an aural phenomenon – and yet, at the same time, he can, quite legitimately; the poet’s past experiences force upon his mind certain information which has not come from his eyes or ears. When he sees the visual data connected with laughter (the smile, the quivering body, etc.) his mind ‘hears’ or at least processes the sound. This ‘experience by proxy’ again takes place in ‘I Saw Aphrodite and Adonis Dance’, in which the narrator tells us that, in a noisy, packed nightclub, he hears one dancer say to the other: “I’ll kiss you if you won’t spill my drink or ash my cigarette”. Here, the poet is not hearing a memory (as above: a re-experiencing of the memory of laughter triggered by visual stimuli, i.e. the sight of someone laughing) but hearing an instinct. To explain: the phenomenon reveals the narrator’s attitude towards the ‘Aphrodite’ figure, based on her behaviour and body language, and perhaps also by his jealousy of the ‘Adonis’ figure and the alpha-male he represents, which is in turn threatening his own masculinity; it is common for men unlucky in love to feel disdain, or even disgust, at the idea of others flirting and coupling, and in ‘hearing’ this line, or instinctively supposing that this is what she is saying beneath the loud music and across the crowded dance-floor, the narrator reveals much about himself. In short, Virtanen’s narrators are able to fill in the gaps in their sensory world. Their memories and opinions, affected by past experience, can replace inadequate eyes and ears. See this extract from ‘Ieshua at the Shore’:


Do they hear, or imagine, the sound of a spreading wing? How close must they get to see the flapping of the gills? They imagine these things, and something imagined is as real as something experienced, to a finely-tuned mind.

The poet can best find his true voice in a silent place, or discover his true self when alone. ‘In a Coalhole’ creates “pink brick artifice of a womb” which is essentially a sensory-deprivation tank. In the darkness the poet succumbs to a different kind of inspiration, one that is not caused by the outside world, but produced by the unstimulated mind:


It is refreshing to read a poet who has not given in to the very modern fashion of abandoning the concept of objective truth. It is of course something difficult for the human mind, an intensely subjective mechanism, to grasp the objective, yet that does not mean that we should not aim to do so. Here, the poet has reached his ‘truth’ through a lie: a role that is unnatural to him, or one that he has taken on in order to believe he is more of a poet: the role, to return to ‘Pantheon’, of Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, or in the ultimate masochistic and egotistical desire for martyrdom, Christ. In contemplation, the poet achieves enlightenment just as the traveller in Dirt Roads achieves enlightenment through suffering. Here, the poet is Saint Simeon, rather than Sisyphus or the starets, or he is Buddha beneath the tree: physically starved but mentally empowered.

The last main theme I will touch on here is that of a return to an innocent state. This is not a sexual innocence but a state of mind unfettered by artistic convention (as seen in ‘Dirt Roads’: the abandonment of ambition and, I would say, an end to emulation) and socio-religious dogma. In ‘Ieshua at the Shore’, a journey is taken “away from the mass / and far from the lore”. One suspects it is the journey that the mind behind the “glazed eyes” in Tabula Rasa would like to make, were it not restrained by society (the innocent and fearless child leaps from the window in the sky dream world, and the fearful, jaded adult cannot follow). In ‘The Great Adventurer’ the hero does not get anywhere because he is too busy reciting other people’s poetry. In ‘Pilgrim’s Path’ the poet and his peers are poisoned by their “medicine”. What they were instructed to consume has caused them to become “ripe with disease”. I am inclined to see this as a poem about the problematic, ambivalent attitude the modern poet has towards the canon. We are instructed to read it, indeed we feel we have to if we are to become better writers (and ‘medicine’ ought to make us better) and yet in immersing ourselves in the canon, in what is essentially outmoded art, we end up with old ideas; there is no focus on new ideas and new invention, only a consuming of stagnant, decaying morsels. We might think of modern philosophy, so concerned with studying old philosophy that it neglects to serve the modern age, infecting the intellectual landscape will old theories which no longer fit. ‘Pilgrim’s Path’, like much of the short poetry in the collection, is oblique. Some of the very short pieces can still be said to be of a high standard, and surprisingly rich to an enquiring mind (they are like Zen apothegms: locked, but unlockable philosophical puzzles). Some, by contrast, are rather pretty and insubstantial, exercises in lyricism which if unsuccessful alone, at least fit in with and strengthen the main themes of the collection).

To conclude this examination without talking about Virtanen’s use of language and technique: I have already mentioned that most of the dramatic or narrative essence is verbal or rhetorical. However, what imagery there is possesses the reader. In ‘Welcome to Margate’ we see “the stones grow gills”, a metaphor for the waves drawing the smaller pebbles back into the ocean. Another example of inversion, of the passive and active elements changing places for poetic effect, is in ‘Dirt Roads’, in which the traveller remarks: “I stuck to my shirt”. One of the more sustained visual sections is in ‘Pantheon’:

a fractured, beaten sonnet
that is to be read by
some smiling lady
with a straw-hat bonnet,
and then filed in her purse,
as she joins the sails
of a caravan of barges

It is rare, in this volume, for Virtanen to stay visual for this long and produce such a complete portrait (‘Dirt Roads’ abounds with brief images, but none are particularly defined). We see the smiling lady, and her headgear, and her purse, and the sails, and the sea-going vessels. There is no colour attached to the images, which we would expect (nor are his “winged tigers” assigned a colour). In most cases, the reader must bring his own imagination to bear on the images, to complete them. This is not a grave matter; it is not important to know what colour the purse is, or what colour the traveller’s shirt is. Virtanen has progressed beyond the novice poet’s desperation to be clear, which more often than not leads to a poem drowning under a miasma of inconsequential data. Indeed, we are still, as readers of English literature, symbolists: a red purse would be associated with the heart, or with blood, or with socialism, associations that might be wholly unintended. Virtanen gives us the data we need to build the image in our heads, the image that he intends, and not one loaded with accidental connotations (we can imagine a red purse if we want, but we know that the poet does not specifically intend it to be red, therefore we do not interpret its redness). At times the lack of specific detail is crucial to the effect of the poem: the vale with the river running through it, in ‘Dirt Roads’, gains more power as a vision, as a sort of Eden of the inspired mind, because the reader can fill it with whatever flowers and plants he wishes. It becomes less personal for Virtanen, more personal for us. This is part of the poem’s pleasure, and consequently its power.

Virtanen’s highly developed ear governs the form of the poetry, yet it is a sharp eye that renders such indelible pictures. This volume does not collapse under the weight of inconsequential pictures but each specific image is immaculate and once read, and experienced by the reader, immortal. I will only mention in passing the likening of a boulder “to a crystal ball of grave insight” (an image which brought me great pleasure) and the lurid “yellow rash” displayed in ‘The Drought Bearer’, the long poem which ends the volume and which deserves more than a cursory picking-over. Containing passages of realistic reportage, intensely emotional lines and, in its final section, ‘Lala Salama’, a few nugget-like stanzas of extraordinary beauty, this is the finest example of the poet’s understanding of the relationship between form and content, the balance of intellect and emotion, and the most complete poem in the collection (I must also neglect ‘The Coronation’, which I hope another critic will attend to in greater depth than I can here, and ‘Seamstress by the Harbour’, the most tender poem in the collection, and the most melancholy).

To just make a note about language, the poet uses archaisms and outmoded turns of phrase. A reactionary critic would castigate Virtanen for “Oh, to say adieu” and the odd “methinks”. Such a critic would miss the point entirely. These are not affectations, or rebellion against contemporary poetics, or a chasing after high-flown language; this is employment of language the reader will recognise as old-fashioned and self-consciously poetic. Virtanen not only gets away with it, he must be applauded for it, because it fits in with the concerns he has about the difficulty of playing the role of poet in the modern age, and of being recognised as such. One must not only wear the “golden robes”, one must also talk the golden talk. So much of this collection concerns the problem of being a poet. The language does not only reflect this, it is enthused, infected with the problem. The poet confronts himself with the language of the past in his quest to find the language of the present and future.