Poets: Hasso Krull (Estonia), Nyk de Vries (Friesland, The Netherlands), and Kim Hyesoon (South Korea)

First up is Hasso Krull, a poet from Estonia who looks a lot younger than his 45 years. His poems appear fresh and accessible, but after each poem he reads, I’m left wondering for a few seconds what has just happened. Krull just showed me how holes are everywhere, that they in fact make up everything we see or do: is the whole of our existence actually build on holes? And when, in another poem, he just described that there’s always something alive in the water, little seeds or bugs, or some pollen, even if it’s water from the purest source, I end up unsure about whether that’s a good or a bad thing. It’s the calm, seemingly sincere way he reads his work, even when his thoughts have gone astray for a few lines already, that keeps creeping around in my own head long after he’s finished. The cosmic and the comic are blended to reveal how life is – as Eels put it – ‘funny, but not ha ha funny’.

After some twenty minutes, it’s Nyk de Vries’s turn. The Frisian/Dutch poet and musician, born in 1971, is introduced as a master of ‘the unexpected twist’, and that’s exactly right. His short prose poems, mostly consisting of less than 120 words (De Vries: ‘Well, none of them ever reaches 170. Unless it really is a damn good one’), aren’t nonsensical at all, but they do plunge you into the weirdest situations, uncertain of how you just got there, and how you’ll ever get out again.

I really liked De Vries’s Dutch debut collection Motorman, which appeared three years ago, but had never got the chance to see him read before now, even though he has performed on some major Dutch stages over the last couple of years. After tonight, I’ll be sure to try harder next time, because his show – accompanied by his high school friend Fokke van der Veen on guitar and a number of samples – really rocks. The short tales are buoyed by the music, the sounds adding an extra tension to De Vries’s already unsettling little universes, without messing with any of the words. The best example is the poem ‘Carnaval’ (Carnival): a young woman’s recorded voice reads in Dutch, while the poet reads them in Frisian, leading to a bilingual duet, of which the English translation can be read on the screen above the stage.

No additional instruments or samples with the last poet for tonight, Kim Hyesoon (1955) from South Korea. But there’s a strong musicality in her words, at least in how they sound to me, because of course I don’t understand a word of what she says in her own language. Simultaneously reading the Dutch and English translations on the big screen, it’s funny to watch some of the differences between the two. In ‘Another Titanic’ for example, one line in Dutch translation reads: ‘ik zou als een slang rijst eten en mijn mond afvegen,/ antwoordde ik’ (literally: I’d eat rice like a snake and wipe my mouth,/ I answered’), while the English states: ‘I’d eat, wipe my mouth, and slip out like a snake,/ I answered’.

In both languages though, these hallucinating poems seem to focus on identity and physical coherence, and the the loss of both. Hyesoon shows us how things and bodies could fit together, how they can fall apart, how they’re able to end up as other things or bodies, in new and yet again unstable forms. When Hyesoon has stopped reading, I leave the auditorium pondering on ‘How painful the light must be for the night’.

After over an hour with these three magnificent poets, it’s definitely time for some small talk and a beer at the bar. I’ll just try not to think about the amount of pollen, seeds and little bugs in it . . .

Why should this surprise me? People keep asking me about U.S. poetry—to describe it or say something about its state, which I’m reminded here is also a political word, though they mean its condition, as if it were about to be admitted to the poetry intensive care unit, or discharged with a tag on its toe. In the U.S. we’ve been announcing the death of poetry for decades.

It’s hard to believe in the death of poetry here. All these poets from everywhere are quick and curious. About the plants scooting around on little robot wheels, edging flirtatiously next to our shoes. About the town, the theater, the cheese. About each other and what poetry is like where we all come from.

If there is, for good reasons, no such thing as Afghan poetry, there is this poetry of Karman Mir Hazar’s, which comes out of place, tribe, experience, and language. Persian. The moderator, who shares in an intimate literary culture, wonders that Karman and his publisher Sam Vaseghi haven’t met before this week. I find a point of kinship.  I never met the publisher of my first book, who died this year. We corresponded by letter. The roads are good in the U.S. Still, it is 3000 miles long and 2000 miles wide and holds 300 million people.

After the session, I talk with the Dutch painter sitting across the table. I am curious, so she shows me notebooks full of whimsical, abstract drawings. At dinner, American poet Christian Hawkey—whom I had to travel to Rotterdam to meet—tells me he was a student of a dear friend, Agha Shahid Ali, who died in 2001. Of the four American poets I will sit down with on Thursday, I’ve met one before this week. But we share friends. Curiosity.  The work. A small culture in a big country.

Here we are all at once strangers and familiars. We find poetry in many languages, inspired by work from other languages, even those of painting or roving plants. And there are people to receive this poetry, all over the world.  Tonight, I’ve returned early to my hotel to see the last event with those others, on my computer on the live stream. I’m curious. In my room, waiting for things to start, I feel (almost) as much in company as I did earlier in the garden. I hear a voice talking Dutch, a harp being tuned. I see fingers on strings, graceful and disembodied in the dark, poised to speak.

My most useful information about bilingualism was drawn not from “second language acquisition” literature but from a famous Soviet spy mini-series about the adventures of the double-agent Isaev working undercover as SS officer Shtirlits in the upper echelons of the Nazi high command during the last months of WWII. Here is the scene that I have in mind. Shtirlits comes to see his Russian agent Katia, my namesake, who is also located in Berlin. It’s a very poignant moment, because she is very pregnant. “You probably understand that you’ll be delivering at home,” Shtirlits says. “Why?” she asks, her German being as good as her Russian, she cannot think of any reasons why she couldn’t go to the hospital. “My German is all right. I speak without any accent.”

“Your German is indeed all right! But when in pain you’ll be screaming in Russian, dear child!” he says with a sigh.

That’s it. And that is exactly what all of us, bilingual people, need to know. The second language as well adopted won’t be the one we’ll be screaming in when in pain.

Here’s the proof. On the third day of the Rotterdam Poetry Festival, I decided to go to see Amsterdam in the morning. I’m not a big traveler, to say the least. On the day I was a bit nervous. Having a map and two sandwiches in my bag pack I left the hotel lobby braving my way to the Central Station. It took me a while till I found it though Lucy Pijnenburg, a festival coordinator, had spent minimum an hour giving me very detailed directions. Cunningly hidden between fences, cranes, working excavators, Central Station looked extremely agitated which added to my mood. As I walked toward it, people in bright orange t-shirts, orange hats, orange wigs, orange everything poured from all entances. On their chests were orange garlands and they were blowing orange horns. “Who are these folks and why are they dressed like that?” I asked myself, as I was beating my way through the crowds. Then a strange thing happened which increased my panic. I asked a couple of passers-by to show me where a ticket booth was and found out that nobody knew what I was talking about. Orange people looked at me and shrugged shoulders. Just yesterday everything was fine. Precious time was lost, my train left, I was still there wondering what might have possibly happened during one night that made Dutch people forget English. Somebody put a garland on my neck and placed a triangular hat on my head. In my new triangular hat I went out for a smoke and boom . . . it all became clear to me. All the time I was there I was speaking Russian, no wonder nobody knew what I wanted. “So what’s going on with all these orange costumes,” I asked a woman. She groped for words: “Denmark . . . Holland . . . A soccer game!”

Here is what I think about it now. It’s not only excruciating pain but isolation too that can burn an otherwise reliable second thesaurus that we keep in our brain, leaving in its spot an orange smoke. After I underwent a ten minute loss of bilingualism I thought: “It’s great that Rotterdam Poetry Festival brings together poets from all over the world and make them talk to each other. Not always but sometimes poetry is a soccer game of its kind, and as any game it needs other players.” Anyway, I didn’t go to Amsterdam. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good day for a trip.

As a rule, small presents are the same for everyone. This time I was baffled by choice. Not only XL, L or M, but the inscription on the breast as well. It is always hard to make a choice, because any choice exludes all other alternatives. I tried to choose from the catalogue, but suddenly, while I was studying the inscriptions, new t-shirts arrived on the shelf with one more inscription, missing in the catalogue. As if especially for me. I did not doubt any more. It was saying: “I am an East European criminal who dies 16 to 17 times a day”.

I’ve been walking all day long with the phrase in my mind. I do not need to put the t-shirt on any more as the phrase got engraved on the inside of my forehead. The more I think about it, the more I get envious of the phrase author’s imagination. It is like a line of a perfect poetry, a poem, if you like. It is absurd from the first glance but plumbing deeper – very rich and provocative. It says so much about the one who created it as well as the one who dare to wear it on his breast – as a good poem does about the one who wrote it and the one who reads it.

The creator of the phrase imagines an East European as a superman or even god. Not all gods die and resurrect a couple of times, some have succeeded in resurrecting just once. Even if I did not consider myself as a criminal, I could have reason to be proud.

But am I not a criminal? Have I not violated almost all of the Ten Commandments during my life? Have I not committed adultery, have I not lied, not stolen? Is it not me who constantly kills mosquitoes, ants, flies, mice and moles in my countryside home? Am I not the one who exceeds the speed limits constantly? Is it not me who violates rules of language when writing poems?

Just one thing I am not sure about – do I really die 16 or 17 times a day? I think it is a small exaggeration.

Eugenijus Alisanka (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010

All day I’ve wandered around the complex and perfectly beautiful foyers of Rotterdam’s City Theatre, the home of Poetry International 2010. We poets, a happy few, are contented with the day’s work. We have also scored a series of little victories in the first round of our Translation challenge. We’ve succeeded in translating three of the poems of Tomas Lieske. Admittedly, we’ve been spoon-fed with brilliant literal translations. All morning we circled around the Present Continuous verb “Ontdekken’’ as in “Ontdekken Dat Je Te Laat Bent” or “Discover (Discovering) That You Are Too Late”—or the title “Kompel” that may mean “Cobbler” or “Coal-miner” depending on whether you are digging into the linguistic heritage of Southern Ireland or Southern Holland. Tomorrow we must work on the texts again. One of my fellow translators, the poet Patrick Cotter, is running well ahead of the pack, but we will catch up with him before the week is out.

It is a day of hidden foyers. Sometimes you come upon a foyer with books, or a foyer with food, or a foyer with a busy bank of Festival interns, all beavering away, answering phones, checking checklists. It is a world of hidden efficiencies, of quiet Dutch perfections. Around the table next to us, in our large hidden foyer, is a group of poets at work on the texts of the sublime Carlos Lopez Degregori of Peru. I remember the first time I saw his poems on the Poetry International web. I was bowled over by their reticence, their humane quality, their astonishing sensitivity. These texts alone prove that translation can work. Some quality of the poetry does survive the translation. We will continue at our dissecting tables: word-surgeons at work, saving organs of phrases and adjectives for a foreign body of words.

Last night was a night of prose-poetry, of poetry and prose, of poetry with its hyphenated life. Hassan El Ouazzani and I read our poetry to a fine audience in the main auditorium of the City Theatre. Ireland’s Ambassador to the Netherlands, Mary Whelan, along with her husband, and the Embassy Attaché in the Hague came down to hear us read. Afterwards we had a mighty chat about politics and culture. Among the Irish in the audience, also, was Lucy Cotter, daughter of the lately deceased poet, Bonnie Quinn Cotter. It was lovely to see her. For an Irish poet it was a personal moment.

We have oscillated between poetry and prose. We have been to the precarious ledge of prose-poetry, Hassan and I; we have been to the edge and not toppled over. Prose-poetry is for outlaws, for outsiders, for those who have endured extremes of politics and culture. Prose-poetry describes a hinterland of being. It began with the French, of course, with Bertrand and Baudelaire, and continued with Rimbaud. But even in the Irish tradition, which is so overwhelmed with songs and lyrics, prose-poetry breaks through in James Joyce and Beckett. It is all of Finnegan’s Wake and a good part of Ulysses. It is everywhere in Beckett, in Molloy, Watt, Waiting for Godot. Godot, a poetry of theatre, with its gestures, silences, timing, choreography, with its worn-down and weary opinion, is prose-poetry. After all, it is Vladimir who turns to Estragon and says, ‘you should have been a poet.’

Prose-poetry is now strongest in the American language, I think. I think (it is nearly midnight and I am doing my best). Prose-poetry is action through reflection. Competent Americans like John Ashbery and Charles Simić have turned it into a kind of guerrilla warfare against anthologies and canons. Prose-poetry invites you in. You don’t need a dinner-jacket. Come right it as you are. It is a summer night. It is Rotterdam.

Thomas McCarthy (c) Michele Hutchison, Poetry International festival 2010

I found his poetry exciting. His subject matter sometimes took me to places I had rarely been: Egyptology, for example, in ‘Complaint of a Shrewmouse (Mummified)’. Most of the poems selected were quite intimate, concerning familial relationships and love. However, the viewpoint of his characters often proves startling (the shrewmouse v. the falcon) or puzzling (‘Caravan of Salt’) if you are not aware of the poet’s thinking behind it. However, even he could not always provide adequate assistance when I queried his work. It is an example of further research that I wish to discuss here, on this forum provided by the Poetry International team.

It concerns a term used in the short prose extract from his novel Gran Café Boulevard. ‘Sprotbuiker’ is a nickname used to describe someone from Roelofarendsveen, Lieske told me, but he didn’t know where the term originated. So I asked some fellow translators what to do with it. One said to leave it out altogether, another to translate it literally, and another still to substitute it with a nickname of my own making. All agreed that ‘sprot’ meant ‘sprat’, a fish used as bait to catch mackerel. As the town is close to water, that would corroborate that theory. ‘Spratbelly’ would then be an adequate translation. Someone with his belly full of sprat. But, as a translator, I am not easily convinced, so I tapped other sources. I telephoned the local council and they knew of a local historian who could probably tell me more. And it transpired ‘sprot’ had nothing to do with fish, but with French beans, cultivated for centuries in that particular area. Farmers were usually left with an unsold surplus after auction, which instead of destroying, they ate themselves. So, while the ‘sprot’ might not be fish, the farmer and his family still had a bellyful. My sincere gratitude to the local historian, Mr Gerard van der Meer.

Although the word was now explained, this still left me with a translation problem: spratbelly, beanbelly, French beanbelly, whatever the choice would be, it would remain an alien term, as it couldn’t be sourced to a specific locale as was the case in Dutch. So, were the other translators right? Should I have abstained from my amateur sleuthing exercise and chosen a simple, even literal translation instead?

Conferring with the translations editor, we agreed on ‘potbellied’, as that referred to the bellyful without getting into the problems caused by connotations not being easily transferable into an English context.

I’ll be present at the festival all week, sitting in on Lieske’s translation project, so please don’t hesitate to tell me what you think of this solution!

But ultimately the wider world of the 1980s did not have space in its consciousness for Irish poets not embroiled in the Northern Ireland conflict. McCarthy hailed from the serene, sedate fields of Ireland’s southernmost province of Munster and his poetic discourse is primarily one of a serene and sedate sensibility. Extremes of verbal music-making or contortions of form are not the markings of a McCarthy poem. The subject matter varies from the intimacies of family tragedy to the inner workings of a political party, to biographical portraits of writers and others in verse, to rigorous examinations of history and the pathways by which it has led us all to the present.

There is a richness of language to McCarthy’s poetry but rather than stemming from experiment it emerges out of McCarthy’s own vigorous emotional and intellectual engagement with the world. The elegance and sensibleness of his language are organic and integral aspects of his mode of thought – a careful, quiet, contemplative thought flavoured with rich emotional involvement.

All of these qualities are not only evident on the page with McCarthy but also in conversation with him. A McCarthy poetry reading is a riveting experience.

Thomas McCarthy will be reading along with Hassan El Ouazzani (Morocco) at 8pm on Sunday 13 June 2010 in the main auditorium of the Rotterdam City Theatre, in an event about the relationship between poetry and prose.

Patrick Cotter is the editor of the Ireland domain of Poetry International Web.

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.

Eugenijus Alisanka, Hassan El Ouazzani, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and Nyk de Vries in Rotterdam

Today I decided to write about two events which I was involved in last week, two events important to me. At first glance they are not connected to each other, but I am connected to both. At least both of them have became objects of my poetic interest.

The first one – my trip to Rotterdam. On Sunday I took part in the Dunya festival which, I was told, gave birth to Rotterdam Poetry International years ago. Now, Dunya is not a literary festival anymore, it is a musical one, so there is only one poetical event on the schedule. The festival takes place in the Rotterdam city park, with tents scattered across the entire area. Music thunders from all sides, energetic Latin, African and other beats, and I can hardly imagine how and where our poetry will fit in. The festival lasts just one day, and it rains that day every year, as organisers tell me. There were attempts to change the date of the event, but in vain – the festival is doomed to be soaked in rain. This Sunday too – spurts of wind turn into gusts of rain. It clears in the evening, and more people flow into the park. But most of them never reach the poetry reading – H. Hesse’s idea about music as a high art is borne out. In the tent of the Poetry park Cuban musicians play, they ignite the full hall, they perform an encore, they take away time from the poets’s slot, the organisers get worried. After the concert, the hall empties, and it is frightful to go to the mike and to read to thin air, to those empty benches which still vibrate with Caribbean spirit.

And a surprise – voices of poets successfully fill all those empty places. There is nothing missing anymore. I believe in poetry again. And I recall how I was climbing once from the bed of the Colorado River uphill along canyons right before the sunset and came across the voice of a lonely flute. It had no audience, its voice rolled over stones and precipices, it echoed from caves and passes. I was an accidental spectator. The veriest one.

The second event – the evening in Zabarija village, at my country-house on Thursday. The dark cloud is approaching, green meadows are suddenly enlightened by incredible yellowness even though the sun is absent, a strange fiesta of colours. And suddenly gusts of wind descend upon the landscape, tearing trees. Bean-sized hail spills out of black cloud. The sky is slashed by lightning, wildfire like crazy. I see rapidly flowing fields, the dirt road turns into a roaring river. Maybe for the first time in my life I am scared of nature: I do not dare even to leave the house. And I am flooded with the wave of an unhuman beauty. Tremendum et fascinance. Nature performs one of its celestial oratorios. I am an accidental spectator. The veriest one.

I have tried to put poetical clothes on both events. But the most striking thing is that both poems I’ve written do not even hint at the stuff mentioned above. Both poems are like preludes to these events. In the first one I talk about the canals of Rotterdam, about the cruise ship, the biggest in the world, docked here, about my transit mood, about the world port centre. In the second one the action takes place before the rain, right before the rain. Why don’t these poems centre on the main events, as might be natural given my prosaic talk above? Maybe here one can find the aim of poetry – to be a prelude, a prolegomenon to the texts of life?

Read more about and by Eugenijus Alisanka on Poetry International Web.

If poetry existed, there would be no novels.
If poetry existed, there would be festivals celebrating the titles of poems, festivals for reading poems by the use of deep-brain stimulators, congregations for (and against) sistine sestinas, festivals for dancing the grammar, sleeping the haiku.
If there was poetry, we wouldn’t really sleep.
We wouldn’t creep either.
If poetry existed, we would have iambic tea, shampoos for troubadours, power plants using packed words.
If there were to be something like poetry, we would live in three-point-five-dimensional rooms.
And everyone would have a room.
If poetry existed, Ulysses would still be on his trip. And each country would have several Inger Christensens and Derek Walcotts.
At borders we would have to show our favourite book of poetry instead of a passport.
If poetry existed, there would be a Vatican for Metrics.
Brokers dealing with interpretations.
There would grow not only passion fruits but passionate panic fruits as well. And we would drink the milk of mother poems — for that poetry would be a fluid.
If poetry existed, we would clear 12 million hectares of tropical rain forest a year to save that poetry.
If poetry existed, no one would walk on stones anymore.
If there was poetry, literary criticism would be poetical as well.
And our capital would be called Poetry.
Electricity would be poetricity.
If poetry existed, nobody would be a poet.
If poetry existed, we would visit non-fiction parks every now and then, and drop some words into the cages.
If poetry existed, we could play the Himalayas on Sahara pipes.
Every new sentence would be our only home.
If poetry existed, there would be no desire for poetry.

Read more by and about Ron Winkler on www.poetryinternational.org.