Q&A with Jan Lauwereyns 3

5 juni 2012 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: When do you consider a poem to be complete? Do you see your own published work as complete?

A: Completion has to do with some kind of release, a readiness to let go. When I feel I am ready to show the poem to someone else, a reader, the poem comes into being. It is born – it exists as an object outside me. Yet in many cases this is not the final version. Even if I consider the poem to have gained a certain level of autonomy from me, it may still need some polishing. I keep re-reading my poems and continue to add subtle touches. I may listen to the opinions of readers (particularly editors, when preparing journal or book publications) – they may point out weak spots or rough edges, things to work on, and then I do – I continue working on the poems, even though they already have an established ‘identity’.
 
I see my published work as complete, but even so, I sometimes reuse particular phrases or sections, I transliterate and translate from my own work, and this leads to new writing. I think of my poems as crystals, as moments in a moving system. Each book of poetry serves as a definite compilation of a group of such moments or crystals. Each book has its own contours of completion, but it is also part of a larger organism – my work in its entirety.
 
Q: Who is the poet you most look up to, and why?
 
A: I have many poets I look up to. Many of them are dead, but some are alive. I like the thinking poets, the ones who show curiosity and wonder, and different ways of looking at things, always ready to explore and experiment in, or through, their poetics. I think of Michael Palmer, Tonnus Oosterhoff, Erik Spinoy, Hans Faverey, Zbigniew Herbert, Paul Celan, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, or even further back, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I also have a particular fondness for the scientist poets; say Miroslav Holub or even Goethe and Leonardo. But if pressed to name exactly one poet, I would pick Leo Vroman, the Dutch biologist, poet, and expat. Vroman combines (and continues to combine, now at the age of 97) the stimulating poetics and scientific orientation with an almost mythological power to live and affect people in the most positive way. He is truly a good poet, in every sense of the word ‘good’ – the most complete role model I can imagine.