Artikel
ROUND TWO
Q&A with Jan Lauwereyns 2
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5 juni 2012
Q: Of all the ways you find inspiration for your work, which is the strangest or most unlikely?
A: The strangest is in dreams. It doesn’t happen often. Like most people I usually don’t remember my dreams, and when I do, I’m left with perhaps an isolated image or two – and this is never intrinsically ‘publishable’. But occasionally this gives me enough of a jolt to get started with a poem; then often a nightmarish one, narrative, with surreal overtones. Once I wrote a long poem in which I saw myself as a wild burro (a wild mule, female, lost in the Mojave Desert) wandering in some kind of afterlife or Inferno (al ‘Dante’). There have been other poems of this variety; one in which Wittgenstein got out of his car and started shouting at a woman (I couldn’t see her face). Kant was smoking cigarettes in that poem and I think – if I remember correctly – the two philosophers were hiding a corpse in the trunk.
The most unlikely way to get inspired is while listening to a talk at a science conference. Sometimes I get stuck on bizarre phrases used by scientists in their genuine efforts at no-nonsense communication: “The motor cortex talks to the liver” or “we systematically varied the survival times between 72 and 144 hrs”.
Q: To what extent is what you have in your head what ends up on the page, and if the two are very different, does this bother you at all?
A: I see my head and the page as one interactive system. In that sense, I think contemporary philosophers like Andy Clark are on the right track, suggesting that cognition leaks out into the world, and that consciousness is inherently a matter of back and forth between the body and the world (the title of one of Clark’s major books is Supersizing the Mind). In terms of the system’s functioning (the poetics) it is actually impossible to separate the ‘thing in the head’ from ‘the thing on the page’. If you think you can separate them, you are fooling yourself.
Even if you feel you’re not happy with the poem currently on the page (you feel it is not ready, or it is missing something, and you need to continue working on it), that doesn’t mean you’re trying to approach the better poem that’s in your head. There is no other (more ‘final’ or more ‘ideal’) poem in your head. What you have is a co-evolution, of your thoughts and the traces on the page.
We can think of the poem as an ‘epistemic tool’ (to borrow a phrase by another philosopher, Kim Sterelny). The poem works as a little mind-machine. It is an artefact (perhaps even a radical artifice – with language that, at least to some extent, invents its own rules). It is a thing out there (in writing or in sound) that activates and extends our thoughts – a good poem attracts our cognitive processing; we start wondering and thinking along. Of course the physics of the head and of the poem’s traces in the world are very different, but to talk about the poetics we must consider the interaction. This is nothing to be bothered by; rather a source of fascination.
Q: What is your favourite mode of transportation, and why?
A: That would be any mode that allows me to daydream, to absorb features of the landscape or cityscape while pursuing a parallel random walk in my head. This means the actual mode is context dependent. In the cities of Belgium (particularly Leuven and Antwerp, during my student days) I preferred to walk – in car-free zones as much as possible; I’d walk for an hour or two, usually visiting secondhand bookstores along the way. In Wellington, New Zealand, I enjoyed taking the train from Linden (the suburb where I used to live) to the Central Station. The train moved through a forest, or not quite a forest – something green enough to give that impression. Then a long dark tunnel, and finally we’d emerge – briefly blinded by the light. The climax: great views of the Wellington Harbor. Then on to a half hour walk (the last stretch significantly uphill) to campus. Now in Fukuoka, Japan, I’m dedicated to my mountain bike, no matter where I go, either to the hospital campus downtown, where I have my lab, or to the large new campus on a hill surrounded by rice paddies, where I do all my teaching. Both campuses are about an hour’s bike ride from home, and I’ve found safe routes to both destinations (compatible with daydreaming).
If I have a time window of at least half an hour, preferably an hour, then I can often come up with very good ideas – for an experiment (either in science or in poetry) or for something practical (something I need to organise or get going). Then the movements reverberate. The act of going from place A to place B allows me to plan a move from phase C to phase D, and so on. It will never stop (a motto) until it stops (an event – as according to “the way of the samurai”).
Get inside the mind of festival poet Jan Lauwereyns.
Poetry International recently had the opportunity to discuss a number of topics with 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: Of all the ways you find inspiration for your work, which is the strangest or most unlikely?
A: The strangest is in dreams. It doesn’t happen often. Like most people I usually don’t remember my dreams, and when I do, I’m left with perhaps an isolated image or two – and this is never intrinsically ‘publishable’. But occasionally this gives me enough of a jolt to get started with a poem; then often a nightmarish one, narrative, with surreal overtones. Once I wrote a long poem in which I saw myself as a wild burro (a wild mule, female, lost in the Mojave Desert) wandering in some kind of afterlife or Inferno (al ‘Dante’). There have been other poems of this variety; one in which Wittgenstein got out of his car and started shouting at a woman (I couldn’t see her face). Kant was smoking cigarettes in that poem and I think – if I remember correctly – the two philosophers were hiding a corpse in the trunk.
The most unlikely way to get inspired is while listening to a talk at a science conference. Sometimes I get stuck on bizarre phrases used by scientists in their genuine efforts at no-nonsense communication: “The motor cortex talks to the liver” or “we systematically varied the survival times between 72 and 144 hrs”.
Q: To what extent is what you have in your head what ends up on the page, and if the two are very different, does this bother you at all?
A: I see my head and the page as one interactive system. In that sense, I think contemporary philosophers like Andy Clark are on the right track, suggesting that cognition leaks out into the world, and that consciousness is inherently a matter of back and forth between the body and the world (the title of one of Clark’s major books is Supersizing the Mind). In terms of the system’s functioning (the poetics) it is actually impossible to separate the ‘thing in the head’ from ‘the thing on the page’. If you think you can separate them, you are fooling yourself.
Even if you feel you’re not happy with the poem currently on the page (you feel it is not ready, or it is missing something, and you need to continue working on it), that doesn’t mean you’re trying to approach the better poem that’s in your head. There is no other (more ‘final’ or more ‘ideal’) poem in your head. What you have is a co-evolution, of your thoughts and the traces on the page.
We can think of the poem as an ‘epistemic tool’ (to borrow a phrase by another philosopher, Kim Sterelny). The poem works as a little mind-machine. It is an artefact (perhaps even a radical artifice – with language that, at least to some extent, invents its own rules). It is a thing out there (in writing or in sound) that activates and extends our thoughts – a good poem attracts our cognitive processing; we start wondering and thinking along. Of course the physics of the head and of the poem’s traces in the world are very different, but to talk about the poetics we must consider the interaction. This is nothing to be bothered by; rather a source of fascination.
Q: What is your favourite mode of transportation, and why?
A: That would be any mode that allows me to daydream, to absorb features of the landscape or cityscape while pursuing a parallel random walk in my head. This means the actual mode is context dependent. In the cities of Belgium (particularly Leuven and Antwerp, during my student days) I preferred to walk – in car-free zones as much as possible; I’d walk for an hour or two, usually visiting secondhand bookstores along the way. In Wellington, New Zealand, I enjoyed taking the train from Linden (the suburb where I used to live) to the Central Station. The train moved through a forest, or not quite a forest – something green enough to give that impression. Then a long dark tunnel, and finally we’d emerge – briefly blinded by the light. The climax: great views of the Wellington Harbor. Then on to a half hour walk (the last stretch significantly uphill) to campus. Now in Fukuoka, Japan, I’m dedicated to my mountain bike, no matter where I go, either to the hospital campus downtown, where I have my lab, or to the large new campus on a hill surrounded by rice paddies, where I do all my teaching. Both campuses are about an hour’s bike ride from home, and I’ve found safe routes to both destinations (compatible with daydreaming).
If I have a time window of at least half an hour, preferably an hour, then I can often come up with very good ideas – for an experiment (either in science or in poetry) or for something practical (something I need to organise or get going). Then the movements reverberate. The act of going from place A to place B allows me to plan a move from phase C to phase D, and so on. It will never stop (a motto) until it stops (an event – as according to “the way of the samurai”).
© Jan Lauwereyns
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