"Listen to what other people think”

30 juni 2016 This is closely related to an important change in the Dutch public debate of the last few years. In the slipstream of the discussions about the figure of Black Pete, issues of diversity, discrimination and the history of slavery popped up as topics which were largely neglected during the last decades. And if they were discussed, there were mostly white, often male authors leading the debate. Recently, I found it very inspiring to read and listen to what Surinam-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch or Arabic-Dutch people think about these identity issues. I am sure that both the Dutch public debate and the art and poetry world in the Netherlands would benefit from a more diverse range of participants.

Maybe you wonder what this question of diversity has got to do with the questions of language and framing we address tonight. Quite a lot, I think, and I want to demonstrate this by mentioning a controverse about the work of Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith is one of the leading American conceptual poets: he is both an acclaimed writer and an important organiser, mainly through his magnificent website UBUweb, a collection of avant-garde poetry and art. His books, which he designates as ‘noncreative writing’, are visibly inspired by the avant-garde tradition, especially by the dada readymades. He usually reproduces large amounts of texts, sometimes with a clear ideological connotation. And by literally reframing these texts in a volume of poetry, he wants to make people think again about how language works – and how it manipulates us.

In an interview with Jan Baeke, preceding the 2015 edition of Poetry International, in which Goldsmith was among the invited poets, Goldsmith was pretty clear about the political, intent of his writing: ‘Sometimes, by reproducing texts in a non-interventionist way, we can shed light on political issues in a more profound and illuminating way than we can by conventional critique. If we wished to critique globalism, for example, I can imagine that reproducing / framing the transcript as from [the] G8 summit meeting where they refused to ratify climate control threats would reveal much more about the truth of the situation than I could possibly say.’ Interestingly, and typically for Goldsmiths method of working, he literally copied this text from an online essay he wrote in 2009, and this was a reaction to an accusation of ignoring the importance of identity politics for marginalized groups.

Goldsmith – a white male, born in 1961 – is from a generation of left-wing postmodern writers, who in their texts indeed show what other people think, but largely do so by reproducing all kinds of ideologically charged language, from right wing political ideas and advertorials to personal confessions. In doing so, they hope to indirectly show how these texts work, without giving a clear-cut personal message or critique. But a new generation is coming up now. And this generation is not convinced by conceptual poetry’s ideas about letting the texts themselves speak. They are searching for their own voices, they are willing to utter explicit political critique, and they are not afraid to use words like ‘authenticity’.

In March 2015, some of these writers protested against a poetry lecture by Kenneth Goldsmith, which literally reproduced parts of the autopsy report of Michael Brown. Brown’s death, caused by a shooting policeman, triggered the 2014 protests in Ferguson and across the US. By exposing this black man’s body to the imagination of the reading or listening public, critics wrote, Goldsmith in fact reproduced age-old racist techniques. That this critique is possible in the US, indicates an important shift in the art and poetry debate: new opinions are raised by new generations who think differently about political issues than opinion makers are used to. An New Republic article by Cathy Park Hong had the telling title ‘There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not Kenneth Goldsmith’. Park Hong sketches a new poetry landscape, in which African-American, Latin-American or Chinese-American writers discuss new forms of literary activism and introduce new poetic techniques that have nothing to do with conceptual poetry or flarf.

As I said earlier, the diversity of the Dutch public debate is slowly increasing too. But this has not really influenced the poetic debate yet, I think. There are indeed some poets who address issues of diversity, migration et cetera in their works: like Frank Martinus Arion, Antoine de Kom, Alfred Schaffer or Rodaan Al Galidi, with some younger writers like Çağlar Köseoğlu. The most radical anti-racist voices of the Netherlands, however, are found outside of the canonised poetry circles, I guess, for instance in the spoken word scene. Even in mainstream Dutch hiphop very interesting things are going on. Sevn Alias, for instance, one of the most important rappers of the moment, is from Surinam-Antillian-Dutch descent, and he combines Dutch lyrics with English and lots of Arabic words. That’s what we call new, inspiring language, resulting from the diversity of Dutch street culture at the moment.

I’d like to end my brief introduction with two wishes for the Dutch poetry debate. Firstly, it would be extremely valuable if white males like myself would take the opportunity to listen to what other people think. A lively debate about diversity and discrimination in poetic language and the poetic field, in which people of colour would have an important part, could be very fruitful. But my other wish would be: let’s not interpret forceful critique as a way of forbidding certain kinds of writing or thinking. Cause I do think that it is still important to keep up some of the ambitions of conceptual writing: to make poetry a space where all kinds of language can resound and come to a clash. As an answer to a question in the tonight’s programme’s description, I would like to see poetry not as a safe haven for neutral language, to the contrary, but as a site where all kinds of radical ideas and utterances can be tested.