Artikel
Gizzi, Hamel, Hu, Hummelt, Jäderlund, and de kom
2014 festival poets: round 2
3 juni 2014
‘Poetry is essentially a threshold experience,’ Peter Gizzi (USA) said in an interview upon publication of his fifth collection, Threshold Songs (2011). And indeed, Gizzi’s poetic voice often stands on the threshold. His verses move across borders in a fluid manner: inner world/outer world, life/death. Listening to language is one of the first principles in Gizzi’s writing: ‘One of the jobs for me as a poet is to listen to the exterior world in relation to some otherwise illegible interiority. I want to connect these two and give the resulting relationship a sound.’
Micha Hamel (Netherlands) is a composer-conductor and poet. He composes orchestral works, songs and chamber music and has also written for dance and theatre. His tragic operetta Snow White (the National Travelling Opera) toured the country and was very successful. In June 2012 he was ‘composer in focus’ at the Holland Festival. He made his debut as a poet in 2004 with Alle enen opgeteld (All ones added up).
Chinese poet Hu Xudong began writing modern poetry as a student at Peking University when, without any clear reason, he was prompted to join the Fourth of May Literary Club. It was a social activity at once mysterious and exciting. He has continued to write ever since and recently, the young Hu, who graduated with a PhD in Chinese contemporary literature and teaches Portuguese literature at Peking University, was lauded as one of China’s Top New Poets.
The poems of Norbert Hummelt (Germany) leave a gentle, melancholic impression. Nevertheless, he is a disruptive factor in contemporary German poetry – precisely because of his unfashionableness. He began as an experimental poet in the vein of Ernst Jandl and Thomas Kling, writing ‘pick-ups’ in which he assembled fragments of overheard conversations without a lyrical subject being involved. He also played with all kinds of writing techniques. In 1992, Hummelt changed direction when he found himself compelled to start writing in the first person about his own experiences and memories.
Ann Jäderlund (Sweden) connects her poetry to other texts and art forms to a large extent. She uses fragments from European literature, such as ‘you died today or was it yesterday’, an echo of the opening sentence from Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Her poetry leans on psychological and philosophical concepts (for example by Freud or Hume) and she attempts to capture the slow language of Iranian films in words. She reworks poetic images from religious texts like the Bible and the Vedas, is inspired by the visual arts, plays with verses from pop songs and expresses astonishment at newspaper articles. Her intertextual approach is embedded in a broad cultural context, but she also shows herself to be an exponent of Swedish politically-engaged literature.
The Dutch poet antoine de kom was born in The Hague in 1956 but spent his formative years in Paramaribo. From the age of ten until the age of fifteen he discovered there how great the difference can be between one’s idea of oneself and one’s actual image, he was surprised to discover how many people viewed him, grandson of Anton de Kom – famous campaigner for the black people’s cause – as a ‘white Dutchman’. In the words of de kom: ‘My identity is much darker than the way I look’. It is the identity issue, coupled with his years in the tropics, that really forms the central themes in the work of de kom.
Read about all of this year’s poets at the festival home.
Were you unable to attend the festival in person this year, or do you wish you could re-live it? We'll be posting clips from our live streams (all listed on the programme) shortly. You can also curl up with a copy of our {piform id="22" title="festival anthology"}, containing poems by each of our festival poets in the original language and in translation. Metal A and Z images via Shutterstock
June is festival month, where we feature all of our 2014 festival poets, A-Z. This year’s festival poets come from 13 different countries around the world, with 11 languages between them. The 2014 festival ran from 10-14 June.
This week we’re covering festival poets G-K (with a lot of Hs in between). Now with brand-new festival portraits by Tineke de Lange and Pieter van der Meer!‘Poetry is essentially a threshold experience,’ Peter Gizzi (USA) said in an interview upon publication of his fifth collection, Threshold Songs (2011). And indeed, Gizzi’s poetic voice often stands on the threshold. His verses move across borders in a fluid manner: inner world/outer world, life/death. Listening to language is one of the first principles in Gizzi’s writing: ‘One of the jobs for me as a poet is to listen to the exterior world in relation to some otherwise illegible interiority. I want to connect these two and give the resulting relationship a sound.’
Micha Hamel (Netherlands) is a composer-conductor and poet. He composes orchestral works, songs and chamber music and has also written for dance and theatre. His tragic operetta Snow White (the National Travelling Opera) toured the country and was very successful. In June 2012 he was ‘composer in focus’ at the Holland Festival. He made his debut as a poet in 2004 with Alle enen opgeteld (All ones added up).
Chinese poet Hu Xudong began writing modern poetry as a student at Peking University when, without any clear reason, he was prompted to join the Fourth of May Literary Club. It was a social activity at once mysterious and exciting. He has continued to write ever since and recently, the young Hu, who graduated with a PhD in Chinese contemporary literature and teaches Portuguese literature at Peking University, was lauded as one of China’s Top New Poets.
The poems of Norbert Hummelt (Germany) leave a gentle, melancholic impression. Nevertheless, he is a disruptive factor in contemporary German poetry – precisely because of his unfashionableness. He began as an experimental poet in the vein of Ernst Jandl and Thomas Kling, writing ‘pick-ups’ in which he assembled fragments of overheard conversations without a lyrical subject being involved. He also played with all kinds of writing techniques. In 1992, Hummelt changed direction when he found himself compelled to start writing in the first person about his own experiences and memories.
Ann Jäderlund (Sweden) connects her poetry to other texts and art forms to a large extent. She uses fragments from European literature, such as ‘you died today or was it yesterday’, an echo of the opening sentence from Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Her poetry leans on psychological and philosophical concepts (for example by Freud or Hume) and she attempts to capture the slow language of Iranian films in words. She reworks poetic images from religious texts like the Bible and the Vedas, is inspired by the visual arts, plays with verses from pop songs and expresses astonishment at newspaper articles. Her intertextual approach is embedded in a broad cultural context, but she also shows herself to be an exponent of Swedish politically-engaged literature.
The Dutch poet antoine de kom was born in The Hague in 1956 but spent his formative years in Paramaribo. From the age of ten until the age of fifteen he discovered there how great the difference can be between one’s idea of oneself and one’s actual image, he was surprised to discover how many people viewed him, grandson of Anton de Kom – famous campaigner for the black people’s cause – as a ‘white Dutchman’. In the words of de kom: ‘My identity is much darker than the way I look’. It is the identity issue, coupled with his years in the tropics, that really forms the central themes in the work of de kom.
Read about all of this year’s poets at the festival home.
Were you unable to attend the festival in person this year, or do you wish you could re-live it? We'll be posting clips from our live streams (all listed on the programme) shortly. You can also curl up with a copy of our {piform id="22" title="festival anthology"}, containing poems by each of our festival poets in the original language and in translation. Metal A and Z images via Shutterstock
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