Poetry reading: Mustafa Kör & Marjolijn van Heemstra

Marjolijn van Heemstra (1981, the Netherlands) is a poet, writer and theatre maker who recently became Amsterdam’s poet laureate. Her vocation is to ask questions, out loud. Her apparently limitless fascination with the unfathomable dimensions of the universe seduces us all into wondering in awe at how all that vastness resonates in our insignificant existence. In her poetry, asking the question is infinitely more important than any answer. This creates a breathtaking boundlessness that gives us the scope to see and move beyond the confines of the human. A constant dual awareness, in which life takes place in the omnipresence of death, echoes through her most recent collection Reistijd, Bedtijd, IJstijd. The juxtaposition of these contradictions gives time a cyclical aspect and the body, which carries within it all possible perspectives, acts as a knot, tying up all those temporal entanglements. Van Heemstra is able to adjust the scale of her view like no other, thereby adjusting our view, and scaling everything within us.

Mustafa Kör (1976, Belgium/Turkey) Belgium's current Poet Laureate Mustafa Kör was born in Anatolia, Turkey, and grew up as a miner's son in Belgian Limburg. In 1998 he suffered a paraplegia in a traffic accident; it turned his life upside down but also made him start writing. Kör's poetry dances persistently through a rigid world in which the poet, aware of all the forces that are everywhere, keeps his balance. His language is supple, enriched by a bi-cultural sensitivity and thus perhaps a harbinger of a new richness that dawns in the Dutch language area. Whoever dives into Kör's poetry soon feels part of the poet's reflections. As Poet Laureate he likes to hold up a mirror to people with his poetry. In Trouw he said: "Poetry does not have to be slick. Poetry is not optima forma, but exactly as life is: bumpy (...) When you read me twenty years from now, I hope you'll think, 'Oh yes, that's how we lived back then. It's lika a cave drawing for generations to come."