What we recognise and what did not yet exist

Ay, staak dees ijdele tranen wat  
en offer, welgetroost en blij
de allerbeste vader vrij
Het puik van uwe aardse schat. 
 
Ay, cease to shed these futile tears
and sacrifice comforted and gay
the good father and before him lay
the prime of him, your earthly dearest
            – trans. Jan Baeke

Or Jacob Revius’ poem Hij droech onse smerten (He bore our griefs):
 

’t En zijn de Joden niet, Heer Jesu, die u kruisten,  
noch die verradelijk u togen voor ’t gericht,  
noch die versmadelijk u spogen in ’t gezicht,  
noch die u knevelden, en stieten u vol puisten

No, it was not the Jews who crucified,
Nor who betrayed you in the judgment place,
Nor· who, Lord Jesus, spat into your face,
Nor who with buffets struck you as you died.

– trans. Henrietta ten Harmsel and Martin Bakker

Why was I so fascinated? Because the poet had invested so much effort in creating sentences that looked constructed? That he had probably done this with the same dedication my father had shown when he spend several consecutive evenings jigsawing a wooden parking garage for my Dinky Toys? This, and the dedication of my Dutch teacher who, despite knowing that there was a slim chance that anybody would be interested in these poems, kept explaining with great conviction what the poem had to tell us. I was apparently unable to ignore all this dedication
 
Having entered the years of hesitation, of being uncertain of making the right remarks, of being uncertain of having the right preferences, of being fearful of being considered completely ridiculous, the poems did what I didn’t expect them to: they instilled an awareness in me that you can say something in such a different way that it implies several things at once. Language turned out to be a set of building blocks, enabling you to build complex constructions that unveiled things you hadn’t thought of before. You could write down something insane that turned out to be related to those seriously complex poems and that also seemed to mean something personal and interesting. But maybe my belief in those language constructions started because Els and Barbara and Marieke, voice filled with shy nonchalance, told me they were beautiful. And I was the one who created that beauty!

This insight then remained half dormant, half abandoned in the cupboard of my thoughts, there being so many other things that needed my attention. The social obligations towards my friends. Because there lay a life ahead of me that still needed  to be composed. Because everyday habits lacked ambition, and I was convinced  it was  ambition I needed to keep me away from the daily grind associated with adult life. Thinking this way proved fruitful, although it turned out that life, indifferent to all thoughts one could have about it, followed its own tide. Life, in its grown-up form, turned out to be as easy as it was difficult.
 
At that age, it was nice to spend the majority of the day living inside of books, living a life that already existed and that could illuminate the matter of what a person should do and what a person should avoid. And to find out we are limited in what we really know and that a lot of confusion is lying ahead of us. I silently thanked the writers for bringing up these thoughts through their books and, moreover, showing me that within language, everything is possible. That there are texts of which their content can only exist by virtue of the sentences that the text is written in, that this content succeeds in maintaining  multiple meanings, that it can, at the same time, mean one thing and another, like a homonym does on the level of the word.
 
But, as I noticed, while everything might be possible in language and I may find it fascinating that there are texts who’s significance coincides with the exact wording of the text, that doesn’t mean everybody enjoys these texts.
 
Appreciation of a text depends on the reference framework of a particular person, and not everybody’s framework allows for poetry like that of André du Bouchet, Kees Ouwens, Wallace Stevens and Peter Huchel.

What I enjoyed, others regarded as unintelligible nonsense. And whereas fanatical Dutch poetry readers adored Lucebert, van Ostaijen, Faverey or Duinker, quite a few British poetry readers preferred Philip Larkin, Dylan Thomas and Simon Armitage, while many Palestinian readers cherished Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish. This shows that one’s reference framework is directly linked to the literary culture and tradition of the country of which the reader either physically or culturally belongs to.
 
Those who immerse themselves in poetry will notice that  there are as many poetics as there are poets, taking aside the awkward devotees and imitators. As every poet is a contemporary of other poets and can be related to one or more traditions created by many poets before him, sometimes clear parallels can be drawn. Parallels in style, in ideology, in background, with background sometimes meaning having to work in dire circumstances, suffering from repression or censorship or a dominant ideology that prescribes how to think, like in dictatorships or countries at war. These parallels form a kinship, and from that kinship poetry clubs, artist groups, collectives, generations or trends arise. Sometimes the poets themselves create these groups, oftentimes it’s the critics that seek a common denominator they can apply to the poetry of a certain timeframe. Sometimes the groups are defined within the frame of an art movement  or a broader literary or artistic trend, like Symbolism, Dada, Surrealisme, Cobra, Situationism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Bloomsbury Group, Modernism and Postmodernism.

In The Netherlands, for example, the poets who in literary history are considered part of the Vijftigers (Fifties-ers) group, are called that partially because they embraced (varieties of) the name themselves, but also because many literary critics constantly related the individual poets to the Beweging van Vijftig (a movement of poetry that arose around 1950). The same was the case for the Zestigers (Sixties-ers) and the Maximalen (Maximalists). Examples outside of The Netherlands are Les Parnassiens, the Imagists, the Beat Poets, the New York School, the Black Mountain Poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Wiener Gruppe, Oulipo and the Language poets. Having a group name is always a good thing, maybe not necessarily to get a good idea of the poetry itself, but as an historical anchor. Like the critic Stephen Burt wrote in an article for The Believer: ‘Since 1994 I have published (not counting unsigned work) more than 80 essays, articles, and reviews about contemporary poets and poetry, from eight-thousand-word arguments to five-hundred-word reviews.  “The Elliptical Poets” garnered more American reaction than any ten others combined’  In that article, Burt used the name ‘Elliptical Poets’ as an approach to write about certain poets, but what happened was that academics started to write about this  ‘new school’ of poets, students wrote theses on them, and some poets wondered if they could be considered Elliptical Poets as well.
 
It is striking to see that most schools and trends, and also most poetics, stay confined to national borders and have their own national identity, even if they are related to comparable trends in other countries that exist simultaneously. This made sense considering that in those days, non-local information took a while to spread over the world. Until 25, 30 years ago the only way to do this was through newspapers, magazines, once in a while a documentary or television program was made. Poetry from countries other than your own was sometimes published in magazines, poetry collections could be imported, but this took quite some effort on the part of the bookseller. Festivals were a good place to get to know foreign poetry, but this required you to be able to attend said festivals. Nowadays, things are completely different. The world is now displayed, summarised, deconstructed, reconstructed, analysed and commented upon on millions of internet pages. Millions of texts are ready to be read, many more than a person could ever read in their lives. And it’s not easy to find exactly those texts that are worthwhile among this plethora of material. But still, with the world so easily accessible, shouldn’t that change poetry?
 
Internet and social media have made it easier to come in contact with other poets, although due to the workings of the medium, those contacts will not necessarily be about poetry itself. We can now see what happens in other countries, what this means for the poets living in these countries, and consider if this is something that affects us and our poetry. So have things changed?

Can you expect there to be something like a globalised or globalising dominant style emerging in poetry, now that the world is getting smaller and more uniform? Or at least, it is when you focus on international trade, the experience economy and the follow-share-and-comment culture of social media. Is the ‘Esperanto of World Literature’, as Tim Parks called it in his lecture during Writers Unlimited 2011 (a term he got from a review Adam Shatz wrote about an Orhan Pamuk novel), also visible in poetry ? Parks determined in his lecture that there are two types of books that have a chance of being recognised internationally, which in turn has a strong effect on the international bookculture. First there’s the  novel about la vie moderne, set in a cosmopolitan frame, featuring as a protagonist an einzelgänger, who is as much self-centered as he is self-critical, being  in some kind of conflict with the world, consumed by a not-unproblematic love, balancing between success and failure. Usually these novels are of American origin, because the world focus is very much on America. The American, even more than the Englishman, the Frenchman or the German, doesn’t have to do anything out of the ordinary to be eligible for international attention. The opposite is the case for writers from Serbia, the Chech Republic and even The Netherlands. In those cases, the content has to be adapted, and also the style has to be changed for an international audience to be reached. In this second category, the exoticism flourishes where, apart from the universal story, the character of a nation, a country or a culture is expressed in terms that readers from the dominant Western culture consider to be authentic.
 
Looking at the poetry world, it is clear that there actually is no such thing as an international poetics. It is also not the case that the poets who are featured in international contemporary poetry collections have created a new school of likeminded poets.
 
Of course there are famous poets and poems or collections that have garnered a huge international reputation, that have been canonized in an era when the societal use of art and literature wasn’t yet controversial. Think about Pablo Neruda, Paul Celan, Joseph Brodsky, Wyslawa Szymborska, Octavio Paz, Zbigniew Herbert, Bei Dao, Roberto Juarroz or John Ashbery. These poets are an example or benchmark to many, but they haven’t created a model for a universally valid poetry. It is of course harder to determine this for poetry than for prose, which is a genre that is more easily deconstructed into the factors that can then be used to create a model: themes, point of view, character and lifestyle of the protagonist, locations, characteristics of style, and rhetorical devices like irony.
 
But more important than that is the fact that culture lovers, the readers and the writers, the journalists, the radio- and TV-makers, but also the many web editors, bloggers, Facebookers, and Tweeters are more interested in their own culture than in a foreign one. Of course there are thousands of exceptions on this statement, but there’s little poetry to be found among them.
 
That the attention given to literature is more national than it is for music or the visual arts is also related to the fact that literature is an implicit or explicit response to the daily life we live, that of our own country with our own hang ups. And even if there is a growing number of people that have a more-than-rudimentary knowledge of English, the lingua franca of our day, foreign literature is still best understood when in translation. And while in The Netherlands and a couple of other European countries books are often translated, in many countries only a very small number of all books produced are translations. In the United States for example, only about 3% of all books published are translations, and literary fiction and poetry only make up 0.7% of that. In China about 7% of all books published are translations, only 2% of which are literary fiction and poetry. These are still more books than a person could read in a year, but they’re not particularly impressive percentages. When considering if a book should be translated or not, it is especially important that the book has been translated into English. Editors all over the world carefully monitor which books get translated into English, as that is considered a sign that the book has “it”. As soon as translation rights are sold to an English or an American publisher, the publishers and authors immediately let others know, as it is a powerful recommendation for publishers in other languages. Apart from that, research has shown that in cases where publishers diverge from this pattern, critics and audiences show little appreciation for this choice. This is why in small countries, no matter how internationally oriented they are, great writers  who did not have previous international recognition are seldom discovered.
 
The third factor that encourages a national focus is the fact that it is much easier for the media to promote an author from their own country instead of a foreign one, through interviews and radio or television appearances.
 
So you see, a certain poem (and thus its poet) can have a significant impact in its country of origin, whilst having little to no impact on the poetry, poetry criticism and poetry interest in other countries. When you take a closer look  at the poetry of particular countries and languages it is clear that the language-related characteristics or country-specific features are more dominant than the idea of a shared international taste. 

Not every country has a culture that is incomparable to that of another country. Tradition plays a big role in many countries. The literary culture of a country develops itself on the basis of the literature that turns out to be influential. And this influence is mostly defined by the statue of certain writers at a specific moment in history (for example Rumi in Turkey or Du Fu and Li Po in China), by the value that critics and other influential public figures ascribe to a certain book or a certain author and by value in general that is assigned to the written (or spoken) literary word in that specific country.
 
In China, for example, there is a strong poetic tradition in which poetry that was written centuries ago still functions as a reference point. Not only in the delineation of genres – what can be done in lyrical poetry can’t be done in epic or serial poetry – but  also in the specific combinations of images, of nouns and adjectives and in the (prescribed) narrative perpective. Still, this hasn’t stopped poets from forging their own ideosyncratic paths and writing poems that, despite having an undeniable Chinese context, show the same individual and actual approach as we see with many Western poets. The same goes for Japan, although over there the tradition lives on in an open capitalist society, which makes contact with other cultures and other poetics easier. In the surrounding Southeast Asian countries, tradition has a stronger impact, there are fewer possibilities for publishing, fewer readers and often social conditions push non-traditional poetry to the corners of the cultural playground.
 
It’s not uncommon to find yourself plunged into an outdated poetics when reading poetry that, because of its striking use of classical metaphors, strongly identifies itself with a steady (or revived) tradition. This is especially the case in countries where the collective is more important than the individual, countries in which various communities are competing with each other for power, along lines of descent or religious belief, and where individuality is often strongly condemned. This is not surprising because odes to the collectivity and the nation are nowhere more audible than in countries where deviating from the norm is not tolerated. Countries with much conflict, little freedom and a strong cultivation of national pride. It is in those countries that we see many classic images and vocabulary dominate its poetry: a well, a jar, a goblet, a candle, a dagger, a lyre, the moon, the stars, raven black hair and sparkling eyes, the body as a temple, the spirit as a portal to divine nature. Notwithstanding the fact that this poetry functions  in a contemporary society with internet, mobile phones, and modern internal conflicts.
 
These, I must note, are very broad categorizations.
 
What is also striking is that all over the world poems that mostly put into words what everyone recognises prevail. This does not mean that these poems are always simple, clear, direct or sentimental only because they reference feelings, situations and circumstances readers can identify themselves with. There are just as well poems among them that are carefully crafted, complex and ambiguous, written in a personal style and idiom. This, too, is a matter of tradition. Poetry has a centuries-long history of being a genre that gives voice to a meaning outside the poem itself, as in a morality or when it serves as a vehicle for romantic rapture. Morality gets pushed to the background from time to time; in times of crisis the need for morality reemerges, but nowadays media, especially the so-called social media, provide us with more conforming platforms to deal with that morality. The romantic rapture’s popularity, however, is undiminished. When we meet it, we are touched. And the person who can attest to this rapture in art or literature will more easily find an audience than those who want to abstain from it. Poems that use their words and sentences to create that what does not yet exist have a harder time being acknowledged. Of course there is always a small community of devotees. This group is and has always been small, but it is there, just like 50, 100 or 200 years ago.
 
Again, these are very broad categorizations.
 
Recognisability does not automatically mean success. Poetry as a genre demands, even if is is not difficult to understand or feel what is happening in the poem, an intellectual effort. Those who want to enjoy poetry will also have to enjoy thinking. More specifically: the kind of thinking that is not linked to the reflex to want to understand the poem. This is even more the case with poetry that exists by its language and that cannot exist outside of its own sentences.
 
A world that is both as small as a village when it comes to virtual exchanges of opinions, dislikes and likes, but also is filled with community borders that are made of nationalist sentiments is not an easy workplace for poetry. Is that a bad thing? And does it mean that poetry itself, or the meaning of poetry in the world, is suffering because of it? I  doubt it. Poetry is a very tough genre. Some say that the fact that we will always be needing poetry in times of death and elusive emotions is a guarantee that poetry will continue to exist, but this again pulls it into the realm of romanticism. I personally think that there will always be individuals within the human species that cannot live without poetry. Maybe because, from an evolutionary standpoint, poetry is the ultimate perfection of the tools our species needs to prosper as the fittest in the survival of the fittest. The fact that we’re the dominant species on this earth is all thanks to language.
 

This essay was first published in Dutch in April 2015, in the literary magazine De Revisor, No. 9.