Thursday June 13th – Day Three

June 15, 2013 I am told by a French painter whose son is a poet that in her youth she had seen the small painting by Rubens in a museum in Rotterdam. She tells me she plans to seek out the museum in the morning, to find out if the paintings are still there. They are exquisite, she reassures me, with the same gentle confidence she uses in her voice when she tells me that even now, whatever limitations I might have as an artist – my sense of not being able to execute the imaginative leap in composition from being a decent draughtsman and a faithful mimic, if you will, to a artist of imagination and compositional complexity – can be overcome. “It is a language, that is all it is. You never learned the language. You can learn it, of course.”  In a French accent, and from the throat of a woman dancing around her seventh decade, this is pure authority. Which is why I walk through the light rain and sparkling sun to seek out the Rubens the next day.  I want to see what she means when she says, "It is because those larger canvases, his apprentices did them, but these miniatures –those he did himself, and they are exquisite."
 
They are lovely.  But alas, not as lovely as her wizened face, her piercing eyes, the smell of curry on the side street heading to the museum, the large bowl of tomato soup I sipped in the museum cafeteria, and the long row of ceramic red boots –identical, stupendously decadent in the museum design exhibit, the still lives of fish chipped up and looking sweet in the way of Swedish pickled fish. Which is the way of poems. For the responsible poet would have written faithfully about the delicate brush strokes of Rubens, the drama in the angled bodies of his biblical humans, the still lively brilliance of his colors. But I am not a responsible poet. Might I be a maverick poet?
 
Were I more responsible I would attend all the readings at this grand festival in gratitude for the fact that they feed us well, give us as much coffee as we want, and somehow appear out of nowhere to unlock the always locked doors leading to where the poets go (I feel happy to be treated like I need to be secure, although I doubt they are protecting me — this building looks expensive), enjoy the guttural music of the Dutch poets, look engaged and moved by the poetry swirling around this grand edifice. But I am not a responsible enough person, or simply badly organized. I have managed, though, to hear some fascinating poets whose work I will read on the page, and then read aloud and then engage with again and again. That list will appear in my last blog.
 
There is a room in which a remarkable online conversation is going on with thinkers and poets in China. A streaming system is in place and we are having these interviews and conversations with folks in China who have read translations of our poems and while it does not feel like it, we are told that thousands are viewing the stream in China. This strikes me as uncanny. I am not sure what I have said. I read a poem by a man whose pen name is Cricket. It is a fine poem. It is a poem that reminds me of something I heard when I was in Hong Kong: that there exists a fascinating genius of transformation in China that makes ancestral worship secular and non-mystical. It must be by fiat.  It is also by faith. If we believe that they live among us, as so many in Africa and around the world do, then we are actually engaged in reality. I have not stopped thinking about this.
 
I know where I am going to eat fish. It is called Zeezout. I salivate.
 
I have been walking around Adonis saying to myself, “That man looks like Adonis, but Adonis is not here, Adonis, like Ashbury, could not make it.”  It turns out that I have been in his presence, and I have not known it.  And so I have not genuflected before him, not taken his hand to shake and to thank him for his art. It is absurd. I discover this tonight in the main theatre.  There is a short and lovely film about Adonis on the massive screen, and we are told that Adonis will then read form his work afterwards and have a conversation. I think, “How remarkable.  These guys have their technology so fine tuned that they will pull off such a stunt and do it well.” Of course, when the film is over, Adonis is introduced and he steps on stage with his daughters to accept flowers. Everyone there knew he was there except me. I could claim jetlag. But I can only repeat what I told some bright Chinese PhD students who interviewed me today, “Poets are not necessarily bright people. Being a poet does not make your smart or nice. You are those things despite being a poet.”
 
There is an image of Adonis walking across a wide plaza, in Paris, I suspect. We are looking at him from behind. He has just said, “I do not feel old”, and I think, he looks like a soccer player—compact, tidy, a many who will go on and on and on. He looks strong. 
 
His poetry slips in and out of my mind in peculiar images that surprise — the way the soul and stones find dialogue or (something better remembered) the “kerchief of the horizon”.  And I think I would say “kerchief of the sky” because I want to make the thing more concrete, and he wants to make the thing wider, deeper, rich with more possibilities. It is good that I do not translate his work.
 
After the film two men sit on stage and speak in a mixture of Dutch and French, and I realize that one is interpreting the other for the audience while asking questions, and soon it is clear that these two grey-haired men are dancing, a strange kind if ritual of physical mimicry — the interviewer mimicking the dismissive wave of Adonis’s hands, and he presses in with a familiarity that says, “We are two brilliant men here together and we are going to say brilliant things.” Which is what I think I sense, but I find myself wondering why I had not brought my huge cashmere scarf that I bought at a bazaar in New Delhi so I can look as dapper as Adonis. I know I am being distracted by my chronic need to make a poem out of things I do not quite understand.
 
I hear a story of two other poets sitting on stage. They speak, I am told, in the compressed language and syntax of metaphor, but with the disorienting syntax of elliptical language. One says, “Diamond in the grass”, and the other guffaws in a full-throated laugh, and they are both weeping with glee and profound understanding on the stage while the audience sits bemused. It occurs to me over this week that people need permission to feel as if they can laugh and find pleasure in what they do not know when they are at a poetry reading.
 
There is a carnival going on in Rotterdam today. The streets are blocked, the bicycle paths as well. There are lots of people on the streets. I find that there are a lot of brown people from all over the world in Rotterdam. They do not nod at you the way brown people nod at each other in other places I have been to. It is because you don’t know with whom you are nodding. Solidarity presumes an idea of where the other person is coming from. In these parts you cannot tell. 
 
I wonder if they fry fish with head, bones, tails and eyes at Zeezout.
 
I read a poem about love to a group of power brokers and sponsors and well-heeled people in the fancy glassy hotel Manhattan down the road and around the corner from the Rotterdamse Shouwmburg.  They are called Rotterdam Unlimited, and they speak about the carnival and the importance of arts and culture and they say nice things about my love poem. But I am not dressed for the occasion.  I wear dark glasses and act like a maverick. Poets get away with this kind of thing. I tell the organizers that I wish I had known.  I would wear shoes, and if I had my scarf, I would wear it, too.