(c) Pieter Vandermeer/Tineke de Lange

For the v/h Van Gennep bookshop, the Poetry International festival doesn’t begin on 11th June but a few months earlier. Ever since the bookshop’s first days in 1978 we’ve had a book table at the festival, but we still experience each festival as vibrant, new and exciting.

We discuss the year’s themes with Liesbeth Huijer: the poets, their collections. After that we start the Big Collection. We get in touch with dozens of publishers around the world, we call and email, make arrangements, discuss quantities, delivery dates, we negotiate, call again, and again and then wait. Sometimes the publishing house turns out to be defunct.

Then the shop slowly begins to fill up with parcels and boxes full of poetry. Some of the collections arrive in the Netherlands for the first time, others are familiar to our shelves. From 10th June onwards we walk back and forwards to the City Theatre with our trolley. The first boxes are unpacked and neatly laid out on the table. And, just as their books have done, the poets begin to gather in Rotterdam. The festival can begin for us!

And so we stand behind a table of poetry collections with poetry fans leafing through them. From time to time they’ll be distracted by a curious robotic plant, but they are chiefly there to see the poetry. Poets drop by and discretely check out where their books are. Fans are made happy with that one small book, imported from Peru. Presenters are surprised to see their books here too. And we cherish one customer who has a charming ritual: each year, every day of the festival, he buys two books.

We change our stock every day, but there are a few highlights already:

The Spoon River Anthology, thanks to the poetry theatre set up by students of Artez academy. Collections by Antonio Gamoneda and Thomas McCarthy, thanks to their impressive readings. De dieren in mij (now being reprinted) by the cheerful Flemish poet, Delphine Lecompte, winner of the C. Buddingh’ prize; and Eugenijus Ališanka has won fans too.

We are able to quickly reorder some of these fastsellers. Contact with P. publishing house in Flanders has been particularly intense. On Friday we’ll get more boxes from Belgium. As far as we are concerned, Van Gennep has made a new friend!

The festival atmosphere carries over into the daytime. We chat with tourists from South Korea, who would like to be photographed next to the poster in the bookshop window on the Eendrachtsplein because they have recognised their alphabet, and are amazed at the interest Dutch people are taking in their poetry. But the statue of the giant gnome on the square, dressed since Saturday in a knitted yellow jersey, looks on contentedly. He knows that Poetry International festival has always been curious about other countries.

Carlien, John, Monique

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 . . .

I am many inside poetry. “I” as a subject, the cognizant “I” is deconstructed. I have never once lived as a single “I” inside poetry. The confusion of the multiple “I” is what makes me write poetry. I am a mother, a young unmarried woman, an angel, a prostitute. I am an infant just born, an old woman near death. When I am a mother, “I” the young unmarried woman is ill, and when I am a young woman, the mother is ill. Like the children who defy school and run out the gate, multiple “I”s dangle from the open skirt of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. “You” inside poetry also dangle from the skirt.

As a woman, I observe the identity inside me that rises and falls, waxes and wanes, lives and dies like the moon. Therefore my body’s form is infinitely fractal. I live according to the way that fractal form is read, feeling the path through which life flows in and out. I love, therefore I become myself. I see the “I” inside you.

As a woman I open my body not to men but to the context of Eros. Such love has spilled out from my body before the beginning of time and it is from there that my voice of existence bursts forth. The essence of my existence does not have a fixed form; it has a moving form, always circulating but never repeating itself.

Therefore as woman, as poet, I dance and rescue the things that have fallen into the coil of magnificent silence; I wake the present, and let the dead things be dead.

Extract from a piece first published in 2010 in Azalea: Journal of Korean Culture and Literature. Translated by Choi Don Mee.

Read more about Kim Hyesoon on www.poetry.nl and www.poetryinternational.org. Read poems by Kim Hyesoon in Action Yes, Double Room, Guernica and Full Tilt. Read reviews of Kim Hyesoon’s poems in translation on constantcritic.com, bookslut.com, xantippemag.net, brooklynrail.org, villagevoice.com and list.or.kr.