Poetry Day

[franceslievens]

Two pages of poems in my daily paper? This must mean it's poetry day. Even the free newspaper people can pick up at train stations and bus stops joins in with poems of well-known and less-known writers. They even feature a couple of poems from well-known people who aren't that big on the writer front. It makes for a strange amalgame of reading material. My colleagues scrutinize it in the teacher's lounge. There's work from famous Flemish poets like Peter Verhelst and Herman de Coninck. The ladies shrug at it. "Well, it's just... I don't know... Blah?" one of them says, "It doesn't mean anything for me."
"Paul Van Ostaijen," says her colleague, "is that supposed to be poetry? I don't get it."
"It's art," a third one interjects.
They all nod. Art is for the elite and they aren't supposed to "get it", don't want to "get it". Discussion closed and I have learned that saying "It is art" is the best way to end a conversation on poetry.
They all like Bart Moeyaert's first poem as Antwerp's "city poet", though. Probably because it looks like an ordinary piece of writing. It could have been one of my anecdotes, but so much better.

I'm guilty of not standing up for what is dear to me. Herman de Coninck translated work by Edna St.-Vincent Millay into my favourite poem ever. When I was 16 I was swayed off my feet by the flavours and sensual imagery of Peter Verhelst's work. I was gutted when he declared he "didn't write poetry for girls of 16". I learned to know Paul Van Ostaijen through a poem I had to learn when I was in third grade of primary school. It was about Marc, greeting everything he sees when he gets up in the morning. It was hell to learn it by heart. I hated the poem ever since. But his Bezette Stad, featuring the famous Boem Paukeslag, brings music into poetry without putting notes on it. I read and see the words and hear them in my head, sung, said, groaned, whispered and cried out by hundreds of voices. That is poetry: dissolving the words into sounds and whispers, where meaning rumbles, twists and turns under the skillfully chosen, impermeable surface.

Comments

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of Poetry Day.

Poetry is very personal I think, for the reader as much as for the writer.
Sometimes a poem just clicks with me, others take a bit more time. You need to think about poetry - it's much more condensed than other forms of writing. Then there's the rhythm and the sound of the words, which is not something most people can appreciate at first glance. Often less accessible, but you can take so much away from it, if you look behind the words that seem to make little sense at first glance.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

I've read so much poetry when a teenager. I even wrote some, but never thought it being any good.

The fact poetry doesn't open itself to a reader as easily as your everyday novel was always what appealed to me about it. Maybe I found a bit of myself in it...

[iphi1.livejournal.com]

I have three things to say,
Zwerm;
Tonkat, &
Music Hall

allemaal in mijn boekenkast. ;
Herman de Coninck, meh, too much Hemmerechts

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

learned to know him without Hemmerechts and is a bit of a teenage love...

Still have to read Zwerm.

Moet mijn boekenkast een beetje aanvullen.
Some things to put next to Zwellend Fruit. :-)