On “I’m A Broiler”

I’ve worked with Heikkinen, a contemporary Finnish experimental poet, in the past, translating her marvelous, transgressive book The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal, which Action Books published about ten years ago. When translating, I love best of all to work with contemporary writers, as it keeps me connected with the ongoing poetic conversation; while I don’t believe myself to be an arbiter of the canon, something I can do is to expand the conversation around the experimental, the strange, the new. And this is exactly what the work of Tytti Heikkinen is.

Heikkinen writes by collecting Google search results and then cutting down, in the method known Stateside as Flarf. But while she may have emerged from this poetic genealogy, there is also something different and larger at play in her work. It’s a kind of looking back at the reader, an emotional unflinchingness combined with a narrative refusal to reduce the work to a derivative object where the point is in the method. You can forget all about Flarf or Dadaist cutups when you read a Heikkinen poem—that’s how cohesive the voice is, how original.

So when she sent me this newer poem, about the interiority of a broiler hen bound for the slaughter, I found it utterly absorbing and unique. In straightforward language, Heikkinen’s poem examines the essence of the broiler, its capacity for forgiveness and devotion even while it isn’t supposed to exist:

blue light keeps the broilers calm
even if they fall to the floor half burnt
even if they are tossed alive among the dead
and so in broiler theology
blue light is the source of ultimate love

For me, sitting with this poem was a tender experience, and translating it doubly so. It’s a poem about humanity, and it’s brutal. I hope it helps to introduce Heikkinen to a wider audience.