“How does your art relate to poetry?” I asked.

“The installation is themed around nature, something I’d been wanting to work on. There is no specific link with the poets or poetry at the festival. It’s more an organic, intuitive connection.”

“Are the plants remote controlled or are they actual robots?”

“They’re robots designed to seek out other plants or people. They have built-in sensors.”

“You’re not worried people are going to steal them? They must be expensive.”

“They’re not cheap.”

He then pointed out a central area where a number of plants are hooked up by thick black cables to some kind of large electrical device. This is where they recharge after a tour of duty. It’s spooky, bringing to mind a television adaptation of The Day of the Triffids that had terrified me during my childhood. Yet somehow when you see the plants roving around they seem innocent, friendly, perhaps they do successfully embody a desire to connect, perhaps there is a relationship with poetry.

Thijs peers winningly through his long fringe and goes on to explain that part of the joy of the installation is when things happen to the plants, when they nudge people’s legs or crash and spill soil. A theatre employee is wandering around with a dustpan and brush as he speaks. In the same vein, he was able to integrate other parts of the installation with the material of the building itself. Since it was due for a refit, he was allowed to dig out sections of the floor and turn bench areas into miniature gardens and this pleases him no end.

foyer decay: autonomous plants

The days before the festival are strange. What needs to be done is done, and it’s too late for everything else. The calm before the storm. Printing out schedules, press releases, translations, speeches, timetables for drivers, arrival times of flights, technical lists. Lots of schedules.

Everything lying on my desk was put in a box with the name Bas on it and taken with the other office equipment and papers to the Rotterdam City Theatre.

Many poets are already on their way here. They’ll be flying into Rotterdam from 20 different countries and 5 different continents. They’ve got their visas with them, letters from Poetry International, their personal schedules, their books and the names of the people picking them up at the airport. They are thinking about the poets they’ll soon meet, about the city and the audience.

There is a huge contrast between the initial introductions which will take place tomorrow, and the warm parting hugs, the type of hugs you would only give to close, old friends, as everyone says goodbye at the end of the week.

A great festival awaits. In the next week, Rotterdam will host enough poetry from around the world to last an entire year. The programme is full with new events, such as a live radio play, a theatre performance, an opera and films. And I’m very much looking forward to the events centred around our two focal points: the relationship between prose and poetry, and poetry from the USA.

But what I’m looking forward to most of all are the poems that will be recited for the first time on the stages of the Poetry International Festival; to the beautiful translations that bring the most unfamiliar languages straight into the hands of the audience; to seeing poets translating each others’ work so they can share it with friends in their home countries in their own languages.

Tomorrow is the official opening of the 41st Poetry International Festival: let the poetry begin.

My name is Nyk de Vries, and I’m one of the poets at the festival. Yesterday I practiced one more time with guitarist Fokke van der Veen for our performance at the opening of the festival this upcoming Saturday.

I’ve known Fokke since high school, where we first met. We started making music together, but after about ten years I found English too restrictive to sing in, since it is not my native language. The band stopped and I started writing prose in Dutch and Frisian, the language of Friesland, a province in the Northern part of Holland. From then on I wrote two novels, and a collection of prose poems. This flash fiction, as some call it, more or less unintentionally arose, as some sort of remnant, small sketches with a life of their own that I didn’t manage to fit into my longer prose. Slowly it came more and more to the centre of my work, in any case in terms of live performance.

Over the years I continued making music, with different groups, though not as a vocalist. Not so long ago, I started combining my prose poems with music. I’d like to refer in this case to the short-story songs of Tom Waits. At the moment I’m working on an album to be released on the Excelsior label at the end of this year. I asked Fokke to collaborate, and it feels like things from different parts of my life are starting to come together: the beat and atmosphere of the early band experience, combined with the content of writing.

Though we have occasionally played live together, we’ve never done so at an event like Poetry International. I’m very much looking forward to the festival.