Poets Pick Things Up All Over the World

Gruwez made this statement when he himself was at the beginning of his oeuvre, having come to the literary world's notice shortly before with a collection which was imbued with the somewhat misty romantic view of life which typified the late 1970s. The title itself hints at the contents: Ach, wat zacht geliefkoos om een mild verdriet (Oh, Such a Soft Caress because of a Mild Sadness, 1977). It was published with an equally illustrative epigram, taken from the great romantic poet Victor Hugo: “La mélancholie, est le bonheur d'une tristesse dont on a oublie l’objet.”

At the time and in the context in which the essay was written, the distinction between singers and piano-tuners was to be understood as a polemic against poets who were exploring the relationship between language and reality in a variety of ways and for whom reflecting on their own craft was an essential part of their writership. In the face of this trend Gruwez, who was also speaking on behalf of a number of ‘neo-romantic’ poets of his own generation, called for a return to emotion, to a profession of beliefs, to the great themes in which the reader could recognise him or herself. “I remain convinced,” he wrote in the same essay, “that a poet who professes his beliefs, evokes the same response in the reader”.  And that is the reader he has in mind. That is also the primary function of poetry: to touch the reader, to move him or her, make them feel pain and joy simultaneously through a combination of beauty and emotion. Today, almost thirty years later, and standing outside all the trends and poetic fashions, it is apparent that this was a fundamental choice for Gruwez. The poet is a singer, who uses his artistry to interpret joy and sadness in himself and in those around him, just like the minstrels of old. 

As I have formulated it here, it sounds rather corny and not so far removed from a sentimental tearjerker. And indeed, Gruwez' poems do sometimes flirt with the boundary between art and kitsch. But the aesthetic quality, the awareness of form, the strategic use of irony and, particularly in his recent work, the increasing objectification of emotion, prevents his work from straying over that boundary and becoming kitsch. 

The collections from the 1980s, A House to be Homeless in (Een huis om dakloos in te zijn, 1981) and The Festive Loser (De feestelijke verliezer, 1985) still consist primarily of first-person poetry, in which the poet is seeking to find the right stance to take on the great existential problems: infinite longings and human shortcomings, life and death, the unavoidable passage of time, the longing for perfect tenderness in a world full of pain, the loss of all that is dear. In the face of all that loss within and around him the poet has little more to contribute than the beauty of his language. “La sensualité du style ne diffère nullement de celle d'un corps qui - s'abritant contre la mort - s'abandonne à L'amour” is the motto of The Festive Loser. At best, art - poetry - can preserve what has been lost by turning it into something of beauty. A poem about the poets deceased mother puts it like this: “I commit her to paper word for word, / clothe her corpse with a proper context.”
It is not only where reality falls short, but even where it is at its most beautiful, as in the presence of a swan on a lake, that reality has to give way to the portrayal of it, in the mirror and in the poem which is the reflection of the mirror:
“it is not the swan which is the most beautiful, but the water / in which the reflection of the swan merges with infinity”. Poetry is then the art of pretence, of inventing that which we long for, but which always and necessarily falls short, as in the early verses of one of his best-known poems, ‘Sourdine’

And if there is no longer any tenderness,
let us then pretend this tenderness
with blindfold hands and eyes half closed,
lying against each other like a frontier

From the beginning of the 1990s, when the collection Fat People (Dikke mensen, 1990) was published, an important shift took place in Gruwez’ work. The style became more sober, less directed towards intoxicating aesthetic effects, though the flair and refinement remains. At the same time the ego is pushed into the background in favour of characters who are presented in a somewhat anecdotal, narrative context. What does remain is the theme of human shortcomings: The singer who is the poet spends less time interpreting his own suffering at the hands of life and more time concentrating on his compassion for the defencelessness and powerlessness of humankind, his love for those who cannot cope with the world. The opening poem, ‘Biografie’ (Biography) is a description of that human being:

the body is a lonely thing
of plasma, bone marrow and grease
and hollow places, full of secrets
and three or four glands with the power to please.
- a body is a lonely thing
which no-one wants to heal.

It is precisely their bodies that make human beings so movingly vulnerable; and fat people in particular have a lot of body. They are enlargements, as it were, of all that flesh: “less than a hundred kilos nothing /l that nobody will ever want”. The portraits in this and the next collection, Bad Manners (Vuile manieren, 1994), of characters such as “the cloakroom attendant” who for lack of anything else has become infatuated with coats, a retarded niece, or the lavatory attendant ‘Miss Pipi’, “the heavenly drudge of stench”, whose only applause comes from the flushing lavatories, are portrayed in a way which is at once grotesque and endearing, in a mixture of ironic ridicule and loving identification. They are ridiculous because they so clearly portray human mortality; but the motivation for writing all this down and preserving it is love: “only that which is defenceless and finite / deserves immortality”. 

The collection Thieves and Lovers (Dieven en geliefden, 2000), takes a few steps further down this same road, through the greater infusion of reality and anecdotalism, some of it in a number of long, more or less narrative poems. The loved ones of the title are both loved ones in the strict sense and all those defenceless people from the earlier collections, while the thieves are everything that robs us of those loved ones. In the final analysis they represent death, which right from Gruwez' earliest collections is portrayed as a jealous lover, a thief who seeks to possess all those mortal bodies more completely than any loved one ever could. In the long poem ‘Advice to a thief’ (Advies aan een dief) the poem addresses the thief directly, actually invites him in and shows around his house, shows him his dearest possessions and memories. Finally they come to the room occupied by his beloved:

Here I keep my girlfriend captive.
In ropes with chains around her feet.
No-one knows the possessor of her body.

Or: do you want to know the real truth?
These twenty years I've lain next to her.
We're proud that we are growing older,
the last ones who believe in each other.
(...)
You must love me very much
that you wish to take so much from me.
But even if you take all I have,
leave her with me, and me with her.

After thirty years, Luuk Gruwez has acquired a unique position within the world of Dutch-language poetry. He is one of the most ‘human’ poets, who has fully realised his ambition of being a singer and not a piano-tuner. On the way, he has gradually freed himself of woolly romanticism, of a desire for aesthetic effect, and ultimately of a preoccupation with his own ego and his own emotional world. On the other hand, against the tide of prevailing fashions he has continued to believe in the ability of language and poetry to express and share an experienced reality, to interpret songs - even if they sound less sweet-voiced than in the past - which give expression to the listener's experiences. It is no coincidence that in his public appearances he manages to move his audiences more than most of his colleagues. He is after all speaking on behalf of them, on behalf of us, on behalf of everyone who sometimes feels lost and wants to be gathered up. 

The poet then comes along to do that gathering up, picking things up just like children do, and putting them in the warmth of their trouser pocket - or in this case, the poem. Like children, the poet sets his face against the laws of oblivion and gravity:

All over the world children pick things up: a pebble,
a marble or a cast-off sock,
the leg of a dismembered doll.
(...)
not just to be given things,
but also to stop them falling.
They absolutely disagree
with the earth's gravitational pull.