Poetry, science, life

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, bestselling author, and popular science writer Amy Ellis Nutt once told NeuWrite Nordic's director, Trevor Corson, that she got some of her best ideas for science writing from studying poetry. Poetry, she said, had given her the skills to bring the concrete details of science alive and to come up with the kind of imaginative and impactful metaphors that can help non-scientists understand difficult scientific concepts.

Here in Finland, one of the most legendary living poets and teachers of poetry is the indomitable 82-year-old Risto Ahti. Ahti also has a cult following well beyond Finland—his work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Over the Finnish Independence-Day weekend, NeuWrite Nordic and the European Association of Creative Writing Programs joined forces to host a two-day intensive poetry retreat with Ahti at the Kone Foundation’s workshop space in Helsinki. Participants came from Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and UK/Venezuela for an extraordinary journey into the mind of this unique creative writer. When Ahti was finished with us, as you can see (above), everyone was aglow.

Ahti's lessons for us were profound and many. For conjuring metaphors, Ahti described a three-dimensional psychic space involving physical and emotional as well as intellectual intuition. A metaphor for the process of writing itself that Ahti used could, he said, also be a metaphor for children growing up to become the people they are meant to be: Under the snow are plants, and each step we take on our journeys of writing and life melts a bit of the snow, so that then flowers can bloom.