Q&A with Jan Lauwereyns 4

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: What, to you, is the most important thing all people should know about poetry?

A: Poetry is freedom of thought. Not, or not only, in a political sense – poetry allows us to reach beyond the practical and predetermined ways of speaking and interacting with others. It feeds from the imagination as well as from the senses to make little mind-machines, little objects that generate all kinds of ideas and thoughts – in poetry we savour things, images, and sounds in a way that can affect us deeply; it can enrich our experience of the world and stimulate our understanding of where we are and what is happening in a way that is quite unique – all you need is language. You don’t need tools or cameras. It is the cheapest and most flexible of all the art forms. It is not like a scientific discipline or a religious doctrine. You invent your own rules or ways of working. You don’t even have to think about how to do it. You can just play games with words, and this is fun, and more than just fun: it is often a source of beauty and meaning, and occasionally it can have very profound effects on our minds. It can change our outlook on life, ourselves, others, everything around us.
 
Q: If you had to choose one word to describe your work, what would it be, and why?
 
A: Perhaps that should be ‘flexibilities’. I used it as a title for one of my books of poetry in Dutch (Buigzaamheden). It refers to the dynamics, the ability to adapt to different situations and challenges, the willingness to see things differently, to compare and to integrate various perspectives. In English, the word ‘flexibilities’ also calls to mind a number of words that point to action and thought; the flexing of muscles, the intuitive reflex, or the more contemplative reflexivity. In Dutch, the word buigzaamheden adds the idea of bending or bowing (indeed, an alternative translation might be ‘pliable things’ or ‘the bendable’) – I would see myself bending over a microscope, scrutinising things, investigating them very intensively, or bowing before the wonders of everyday life, as in the poem “Reality” by Miroslav Holub (“Something before us bowed low before / the fact of the operating-table / the fact of the window / the fact of space / the fact of steel / with seven blades”).
 
Q: What are you most looking forward to about the next few years?
 
A: I look forward to continuing doing what I’m doing. In the Japanese calligraphy class that I’m taking, I had to pick one kanji (ideogram) as a motto for this year, and I chose 進, the stem of the verb susumu, meaning ‘to continue’. I would like to move on as much and as far as I can with the projects and things that I’m working on every day, both in literature and in science. This means exploring my surroundings together with my family and friends in Japan, as well as traveling overseas and meeting new people; it means exploiting the riches of language (the general faculty as well as a few particular instances; mainly English, Dutch and Japanese); and learning about life and consciousness (through experiments in neuroscience as well as through philosophical and lyrical investigations). All of this will generate complex interactions, with no stereotypical input-output structure; it will be impossible to tell where the reading and learning ends; likewise there will be no border to draw, other than an imaginary one, to indicate where the writing and producing begins. The receiving of information will often entail a component of giving or sending, as when we have to move our eyes to be able to see an object.