“I can afford to have principles”

December 16, 2009 Three telephones lie on the Poet Laureate’s table. During the interview, these are mostly ignored. Mostly, but sometimes there is no alternative. Then the poet/actor enters into a short conversation that oscillates rapidly between professionalism and art. The time of the appointment and the suit that should be worn for the occasion: “No tie, just two buttons open.” Now and again the computer beeps when an e-mail comes in. Newspapers, newspaper cuttings, notes and translations are scattered on the improvised desk. There is no spot that doesn’t serve the written or proclaimed word. The rest of the apartment is crammed with books and hundreds of CDs of classical music. It is the backdrop to a dual talent with a unique poet’s career. After all, which Poet Laureate has held an official post as poet for half of his publishing life? In 2005 the Dutch-Palestinian Ramsey Nasr was the city poet of Antwerp. Nasr came, saw the political squabbling, and conquered everybody’s hearts. It earned him an honorary degree at the University of Antwerp as well as the right pedigree for the function of Poet Laureate.

Poet Laureate, what is a typical day for you?
Full with planning and administrative work. Answering e-mails, phoning, agreeing appointments. This poethood enforces a strange rhythm. At the moment I have to work on a poem for the International Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam. This has to be ready in a few weeks. At the beginning of this kind of period everything is quite calm. Until a week before the deadline. Then the stress rears its ugly head. This peaks in the couple of days before submission. Stress, stress, stress until it has been completed. There is a brief moment of relaxation and the cycle begins again.

Do you receive many requests?
Yes, a lot. And even then, the SSS [Stichting Schrijvers School Samenleving, the Writers School Society Foundation, an organisation which regulates authors’ lectures] wards off quite a few. Then there are requests from people who have heard that there is a Poet Laureate – and, oh yes, the opening will take place in four days and it would be great if you had a poem for that.

I invest a lot of energy in writing a poem. So it is purely for practical reasons that I don’t accept many assignments. And certainly no assignments that are not for the fatherland. You should place ‘fatherland’ between quotation marks [laughs]. But the poem should transcend the assignment, the concrete occasion. I had my doubts about the Architecture Biennial. I’m stuck with a highbrow event again. It probably sounds horrible, but I would like to reach other people with my poetry. But when the theme turned out to be ‘the open city’, I did feel some affinity. It offers me the opportunity to talk about our society in general.

So, if TNT Post installs new postbox, you won’t be making a poem to mark the event, like your predecessor Driek van Wissen?
Wait a minute! If I was approached to think up a maxim to be displayed on every postbox, then I would accept immediately. That harmonises with the intention of the Poet Laureate who has the task of pestering people with poetry in a clever way. Yes, let’s call it ‘pestering’.

You are also an actor. An actor who is not on form still has to perform. The show must go on. As a poet, you could attempt to pursue a similar commitment. You could probably make lots of money in the process. Why don’t you do that? Professional ethics?
Yes, professional ethics, personal principle or citizen’s honour, whatever you want to call it. I don’t do this to fill my bank account. At a time when I can make money easily, my voice is worth less if I want to express something important. Everyone – and I mean this sincerely – ought to do what he or she wants to do, but I’m not like that. I used to think that an actor lost his credibility when he acted in a soap series or an advertisement. I remember going to a performance of Thyestes, with Hans Kesting in the leading role. On my way to the theatre I heard an advertisement. Kesting was promoting smoked sausage or sanitary protection or suchlike. That image stayed with me during the entire performance. But I have matured in the meantime. My best friends also began to do advertising. They have children, a mortgage, a car. I don’t have these. I can afford to have luxury goods such as principles. I can bang the drum as much as I want at the moment, but what if I myself want to buy a house? What if I don’t have any engagements for a month, and then I receive an offer worth thirty thousand euros just to walk across the frame? Well, that’s when it becomes difficult.

In the appendix to your collection of poetry for Antwerp you wrote that you were poetically overworked at a certain moment.
I am still overworked after every poem. I admire artists like Shostakovich who wait patiently and then suddenly write it all down in one fell swoop. I’m not like that. I am more of a plodder. A plodder who is good at planning. I write, and I never allow anyone to read anything until just before the day of judgment. In the meantime I think: “What on earth have I got myself into this time?”

Recently I wrote three sonnets about the fact that it has been four hundred years since Hudson entered the bay at present-day New York. It had been eight or nine years since I wrote a sonnet. I found it very difficult at first. I was used to thinking in broad metaphors and suddenly you’re there with five buckets of water that you have to inject into a perfume bottle.

To whom do you show your poems prior to publication?
That can be anybody. If I meet you in the bar the day before the deadline and we get to talking about it, I’m quite capable of phoning you the next morning. I often contact my editors at the publisher’s, or otherwise anyone that I can trust and can get in touch with. At NRC Handelsblad [Dutch daily newspaper] I requested an e-mail address that various editors have access to. Those are people who know all about science, domestic and foreign affairs, art, etc. Sometimes when I send an e-mail to that address I receive a response from editors that I don’t know, from people who may not even be hardcore poetry lovers. I need those reactions, I live on feedback. Of course, this does not mean that you should belie your own nature.

In terms of that house, you won’t miss your fatherland. You still live in Antwerp.
That’s right, but I want to move to Amsterdam. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. I viewed some houses there recently. I had the vain hope that I could organise something via certain channels. The Amsterdam Councillor for Culture thought that too. But the person who deals with numbers didn’t share our opinion. I even explained that I didn’t need to have a house in Amsterdam under my own name. It would be more of a working address. And for all I care, they could evict me when the poethood elapsed. But no, they didn’t take to that idea. So I’m continuing my search. Otherwise I’ll just have to travel back and forth a lot.

Do you still manage to write poems that are not for the nation?
After becoming city poet I no longer wrote any of my ‘own’ poetry. It was a kind of overkill. When that year was over, I thought: “Will I ever get excited about it again?” I then devoted my energy to other things; I didn’t think at all about writing poetry. That fortified my belief that I can conceive the most appropriate form for a subject whenever necessary. Will I write an opinionated article, or perhaps a novel, or maybe even a libretto? As an artist – I used to have difficulty with this term but I’ve got over that now – you have the inner urge to say something. That may be a poem. But I don’t have to restrict myself to that one genre.

You often weave historical facts into your poems. Are they accurate or do you apply a substantial dose of poetic license?
They must be truthful. If I notice that a certain jacket consistently recurs in Vermeer’s painting, I consult the books to see if I’m right and why that is so. If it turns out that this jacket was later found among Vermeer’s household effects, that can genuinely move me. If I refer to the current credit crisis, I check a metaphor with a friend in a high position at the ING bank. If I was wrong, the whole poem would have to be discarded. For a lengthy poem about Shostakovich, I wanted to process a number of literal quotes. Then I searched through all kinds of books and I jotted down countless notations of sentences he once uttered. If he had ever said: “I have bought a blue boat”, I might scrap the word ‘blue’. It’s not really important, but I adhere strictly to the rules that I impose upon myself, from poem to poem.

You write poetry about the miserable existence of the underprivileged in Antwerp, about a Flemish case of extortion, about the relationship with America . . . Can Ramsey Nasr still write about love? Or about his own suffering?
Do you mean that as a joke? I see my love poems as also being a matter of social engagement, partly due to my experiences in the past few years. There is certainly a specific commitment. You shouldn’t see that as a question of mounting the barricades or taking a plane to Iraq. But it does mean that I keep my eyes and ears open, that I want to live in a certain way, purely in language if necessary. It is nonsense to claim that love has no interface with the way we experience life.

There are nine years and a world of difference between the sonnet in your first collection entitled 27 gedichten en geen lied (27 poems and no song) and the Hudson sonnets. You have shifted from heavy romanticism to humanism. Can’t the Poet Laureate be a fatalist?
Well, not much hope emanates from ‘In het land der koningen’, a poem about Karst Tates [who attempted to attack the Dutch royal family]. With regard to my first collection, I admit that it was not absolutely successful from beginning to end. It was only with my second collection that I knew “This is all mine, I’m copying no one.” My poetry became looser, lighter. And also formal. With my most recent sonnets, I wanted them to have iambic pentameters and a rhyme that worked. But I also intensely enjoy  shuffling the rhyme forwards so that it becomes internal rhyme and the final rhyme is chiastic. I want the volta to be respected, and I want the number of verses to be correct, but it’s not essential to an have ABBA rhyme scheme. I want it to be animated, so that it looks like a perfectly formed sonnet although it is much freer. My first collection suffers from the almost metronomic aspiration to do it right. That urge to prove myself has now vanished.

Moreover, a person changes in the course of time. The erstwhile fanatical adolescent has disappeared. Nowadays I am more interested in polyphony. My parents taught me to have respect for other people. They taught me to listen to the people around me and not to use them as merely a springboard for my own arguments. Perhaps that is the reason why I became an actor – due to the empathy, the ability to see things from the other person’s point of view. After all, as soon as you can think in the same way as your enemy, a large part of the conflict is often resolved.

You wrote the satirical Kapitein Zeiksnor & De Twee culturen (Captain Sourpuss & The Two Cultures) about an older gentleman who fulminates against the deterioration of morals. You are the author of the necessary opinionated articles and poems about current events. How will you prevent yourself becoming a ‘Zeiksnor’?
By not taking myself too seriously. ‘Psalm voor een afkomst’ [Psalm for an origin, a poem to accompany an exhibition on Calvin] is my way of expressing moralism, namely, by allowing doubt. Psalms are refuges of doubt, par excellence. Within their framework, people can feel guilty, can ask God questions. You should never place yourself above your morals. You should not complain that the world has not altered even after twenty years of whining. I get my resilience from putting things in perspective. We would all be better off if we could occasionally say “I just don’t know.” This article was originally published along with Ramsey Nasr's Hudson Sonnets in Awater, no. 24, October 2009.