Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back poet Louhi Pohjola, based in Portland, Oregon. She first joined us for our “Wild” issue and returns with two singing poems evoking ancestors and a rich sense of cultural and creative heritage. The first, “Muistoja,” or “Memories,” laments the loss of her ancestral home during the wars of the Twentieth Century. “Mummi, your soul was a firefly/ that flitted around the swimming hole/ before the soldiers came, before the bombs/ came, before so many boarded the trains,/ before your land was a dust bowl.” Louhi creates a music with her words that recalls the mythological ballads of antiquity, pulling the spirit of the ancestors close to our time. The interpolated Finnish phrases create rhythms and extensions of meaning that captivate us even if we don’t speak Finnish (footnotes are included for the curious). The second poem, “My Ancestors Hum” celebrates how her voice, “spinto soprano” as it has found its particular expression, continues the theme begun her forebears, “as the ancestors/ hum me to my notational/ space in the rippled/ score of time.” The term spinto soprano is a vocal term that connotes a voice with lyrical quality that has bloomed into a more dramatic, heavier tone. It is apt here. It is a rich and magical voice wielded with intelligence and skill.
Read Louhi’s musical poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Family” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Louhi Pohjola was born in Montreal, Canada, to Finnish immigrant parents. She was a cell and molecular biologist before teaching sciences and humanities in a small high school in southern Oregon. She is an avid fly-fisherwoman and river rock connoisseur. She enjoys fiber arts, reading, and chamber music and is obsessed with black holes and octopi. Louhi lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and her temperamental terrier. The latter thinks that he is a cat.