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Q&A with Jan Lauwereyns

Carole Nickerson on sxc.hu
5 juni 2012
Get inside the mind of festival poet Jan Lauwereyns.
Poetry International recently had the opportunity to discuss a number of topics with festival poet Jan Lauwereyns. In fact, our dialogue was so successful that we can’t fit it all into one blog post. Instead, we are pleased to present the results over a number of days.

Q: Are you looking forward to the 43rd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam? If so, what about it excites you the most?

A: Yes, absolutely, it is my favorite literary event. Third time participating – I was there before as an invited poet in 2003 and again in 2007 to give a lecture on the brain, rituals, and altered mind states. I also contributed as a translator for several Japanese and New Zealand poets (in 2005, 2007, and 2008). I look forward to meeting old friends and fellow poets, and getting to know new poets. The Festival really offers poets the opportunity to interact with each other and with the public in the most meaningful sense – this is the equivalent of a top-level science workshop; a place where new literature starts to happen.

Q: What languages do you write in? If several, do you have different approaches/mindsets when working with those languages?
 
A: I write mostly in English and in Dutch. English is now my first language, the language I use in my profession as a neuroscientist, for teaching and communicating about research and practical matters. Dutch is the language in which I’m most confident creatively; it used to be that I wrote poetry only in Dutch, but that is no longer true. A good number of years ago I started writing integrative essays in English, not just technical research reports – this has materialized in the form of books (published by The MIT Press; The Anatomy of Bias in 2010, and Brain and the Gaze due in September this year) – books that combine philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and literary theory, and contain quite a bit of poetry. Thanks to this work, my command of English has improved substantially – to the point of equaling or even surpassing my command of Dutch (indeed, my Dutch is becoming somewhat “rusty”).
 
I’ve also written a bit in Japanese – but in a more “oral” vein – as a transcript of spoken language. Japanese is a very practical language for me; it is the language I speak at home with my children, and in the lab with my colleagues and students. (For comparison: in my daily life in Japan I never get to speak Dutch.) So Dutch is my literary language, Japanese my spoken language, and English the language of my “Ueber-Ich,” my consciousness, the default mode.
 
I’ve also got a soft spot for two other languages: French and German. I read quite a lot in these two languages, and have even written a long poem in French, together with the Japanese poet Shoichiro Iwakiri (a Poetry International guest in 2008). Both Shoichiro and I are compulsive readers of Charles Baudelaire, so we wrote a “Baudelaise” together, in French because in that language we could interact on equal terms, both of us moving some distance outside our linguistic comfort zone (the poem will be published as a bibliophile book by Druksel, Ghent, to be launched . . . during this festival).
 
Q: What is something you would really love to do before you die (i.e., something you don't want to leave incomplete/unfinished)?
 
A: Wow. That’s a deep question. I try to live my life so that I can look at myself in the mirror (I have a very demanding and ethical mirror). I can’t say that my mirror is always happy, but I’m really doing what I can to please it/him/me. The upshot of this is that my work is my life, with no anxieties about the incomplete. The end of my work will coincide with the end of my life; I am ready at any time to accept that it is finished (just as much as I am ready at any time to accept that it goes on).

This doesn’t mean I don’t care. On the contrary, I care very much (I would like to go on as long as I can). It is rather with a mindset like that of “the way of the samurai” (described in Hagakure by the 18th-century samurai Tsunetomo Yamamoto – who was from Kyushu, by the way, the island where I live). The samurai does whatever he does with the conscious knowledge that it could be his last act. You never postpone what you can do now, unless the thing you considered doing was unimportant. You just move on to the best of your abilities, always singing your swan song, mindful of the finite borders of life and work, and the infinity of beauty, death, the truths of the past.
© Jan Lauwereyns
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