‘I Am A Finn,’ James Tate
I am standing in the post office, about to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family. I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop). Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language. He knew Luther and translated the New Testament. When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger no one suspects that I am a Finn. I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec on the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid to show their quivery emotions, secure in the knowledge that my grandparents really did emigrate from Finland in 1910 – why is everybody leaving Finland, hundreds of thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia? Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue or grey eyes. Today is Charlie Chaplin’s one hundredth birthday, though he is not Finnish or alive: ‘Thy blossom, in the bud laid low.’ The commonest fur-bearing animals are the red squirrel, musk-rat, pine-marten and fox. There are about 35,000 elk. But I should be studying for my exam. I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight, assuming I pass. Finnish Literature really came alive in the 1860s. Here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no one cares that I am a Finn. They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää, winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature. As a Finn, this infuriates me.
James Tate (1943--2015) was an American poet, born in Kansas City, Missouri. His first book, The Lost Pilot, was published in 1967 while Tate was still a student at the University of Iowa’s Writer Workshop. After graduating, Tate taught creative writing, teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1971 onwards. James Tate passed away on July 8th, and I confess I had forgotten about Tate’s poetry until I read about his death, and took a morbid joy in rediscovering his writing. Tate was equally influence by the conversational and colloquial poetry of William Carlos Williams and the surreal and startling poetry of Benjamin Péret, and this infusion rings out in his writing. ‘I Am A Finn,’ from Tate’s 1990 collection Distance from Loved Ones is a favourite Tate poem of mine for the way it perfectly infuses humour and the philosophy of poetry without diminishing from either. The speaker, Kasteheimi is wholly realized, a lively and surprisingly relatable character.
A neurotic, the key to Kasteheimi comes in the line ‘But I should be studying for my exam.’ Tate has the confidence to let the reader wait for this line, and uses the rhythm and structure of the poem to make it simultaneously stand out and be unremarkable. The numerous references to Finns and Finland are paradoxically unconscious distractions from his real concern about his exam results (and therefore, his future) which we find out in ‘I Am Still A Finn,’ he has failed. Kasteheimi’s constant reassurance that he is still a Finn could therefore be seen as a point of comfort; that he will fail his exams because he is a Finn in America, where they do not appreciate Finnish literature. Moreover, he is attempting to find a point of pride to soothe a hurt ego. However there is also a beautiful metafictional game being played. The title is almost taunting--we are well aware that James Tate is not a Finn. The facts that Kasteheimi brings up about Finnish people are superficial: ‘Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue / or grey eyes.’ Tate draws us in and pushes us out with his weaving of poetical language and plain prose, creating humour in the understood gap between the narrator and the writer. The final stanza almost dares us to believe him: ‘They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää, / winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature. / As a Finn, this infuriates me.’ Kasteheimi is obsessed with his identity, but the poem inherently undermines him at every step; and therefore calls to question our own ways in which we write our identity. There are three people in this poem--Kasteheimi, Tate-Kasteheimi, and Tate alone as the author--and all combine to create the identity of Kasteheimi that we as an audience then interpret.
‘I Am Still A Finn’ therefore ridicules both the act of reading a poem, and the stability of identity. But it is still a joyful, exciting and pleasurable poem to read--there is an adventure in both acts that forces us to take part, regardless of its possible irrationality.














