SUCCESS

For whom do you publish a poetry book? If you sell five hundred copies it's a success!

Charles Ducal



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IDLENESS

Pre-eminently, poetry is possessing the discipline to do nothing at all, to cultivate the right to idleness.

Leonard Nolens



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SERENITY

There is a time to sing, a time to dance
and a time to accomplish one’s life in pure
serenity and peace.

Robert-Edward Hart, 1937.



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NOSE

Poets have a good nose for those things that don't exist yet.

Philippe Cailliau



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KRAKOW

It's easy to mobilize four hundred people for a poetry night here. Krakow is in many respects a lyrical city.

Adam Zagajewski



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LINGUISTICS

Many contemporary poets think poetry is a linguistic game. For me it is -other than philosophy but with the same power- a way to deal with the main questions.

Adam Zagajewski



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LOOKING

Poetry can teach you to look well, to see better, to realize, to see through.

Lambert Wierenga



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OPENESS

The openess of poems, their ambiguity and complexity must be protected. If you try to explain the poem, you frame it. You fixate. Why would you do that?

Mustafa Stitou



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FLOWER (2)

The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wordly or with the flower of the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson



With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some poetry books, I live without envy.

Lope de Vega



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BALANCE

The poet, like the painter harmonizes what seems to the vegetative eye irreconcilable aspects of the world, into a great design, a great balance.

William Blake



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PASSION (2)

Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.

Robert Graves





With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion.

Edgar Allen Poe



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LOGIC (2)

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Louis Aragon



Poetry differs in this respect from logic, that it is not subject to the active powers of the mind and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connection with the consciousness or will.

Percey Bysshe Shelley



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IDOL

The common herd are lovers, poets are idolaters.

Charles Baudelaire



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HAIKU

Haiku doesn't change your life, but because your life is changing, you reach haiku.

Herman van Rompuy



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MANNER

Poetry acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness.

Percey Bysshe Shelley



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IDEAL

First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy; and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.

Paul Klee



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LUCK

A poet will always have a sneaking regard for luck because he knows the role which it plays in poetic composition. Something unexpected is always turning up, and though he knows that the Censor (in him) has to pass it, the memory of the lucky dip is what he treasures.

W.H. Auden
From: The dyer's hand



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MOTIVE

Among the several motives which may impel a poet to write about poetry, we must not overlook those arising from necessity or obligation. A young poet may find himself writing essays on poets and poetry, simply because a young poet, if he has any talent for journalism at all, can earn more money by writing about other poets' poetry, than he can by selling his own.

T.S. Eliot



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NOTHING

Poetry has no truth, not anything to determine, it only has itself. It is nothing and yet it is there. One must have a special gift to discover that nothing.

Nic van Bruggen

From: 'Portret van een jonge man als een dichter'; De Periscoop, ed. July-August 1962, Brussels.


Sent by Bert Bevers
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WORK

If Goethe had had to prepare supper, salt the dumplings;
If Schiller had had to wash the dishes;
If Heine had had to mend what he had torn,
to clean the rooms, kill the bugs-
Oh, the menfolk, none of them would have become great poets.

Emerenz Meier (1874 – 1928)



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GRAVITY

A poem needs to have a centre of gravity, there must be axes and structures, like in a snow crystal; or put it differently: a poem should have the structure of a flower. It is an organism.

Ida Gerhardt (1905 - 1997)



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FEELINGS

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

W.H. Auden (1907 - 1973)


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SHOWER

A poem is a good place to have a shower.

Philippe Cailliau



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BELIEF

No, the poet doesn't believe in anything. He would like to believe. It's through the poem he hopes to believe in something. Certainties in these poems are to be considered hope or wishes. The poem itself believes. But something which renders the poem credible, doesn't have to be that for the maker. Look: you don't write poems about things that are obvious for you. Then they would just become little tracts. A poem tries, follows a path, is something you don't know for yourself, or something you don't believe in yet. In that sense a poem shapes its creator. After each succesful poem he has become a different person.

C.O. Jellema, talking about his book 'Ongeroepen'.



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CRAFTSMANSHIP

What one admires in good poetry, is craftsmanship. Poets don't look at each other for some philosophical meaning they give to life but they look at technical skills. Workmanship of the medium, that is what can be appreciated with others.

Derek Walcott


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WEATHER

A poem is yesterday's weather report for tomorrow's reader.

Philippe Cailliau


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FREEDOM (2)

Freedom lies in being bold.

Robert Frost (1874 -1963)



The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.

Jim Morrison (1943 - 1971)



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JOKE

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.

W.S. Merwin



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ORGANISM

A poem needs to have a centre of gravity, there must be axes and structures, like in a snow crystal; or put it differently: a poem should have the structure of a flower. It is an organism.

Ida Gerhardt (1905 - 1997)


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EXISTENCE (2)

A poem only comes into existence when it is being read. But each time it is read it begins a new life. And in a different way.

Cees Buddingh’
Sent by Bert Bevers



The poem is ready before it has come into existence; it's just that the author doesn't know his tekst yet.

Gottfriend Benn
Sent by Bert Bevers



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TRAVEL (11)

I was born to travel and write verse.

Théophile Gautier



Writing while traveling is far more important to me than traveling while writing.

Albert Hagenaars



Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.

William Shakespeare



Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

Wystan Hugh Auden



Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson



Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

Ralph Waldo Emerson



I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad—and to travel for it too!

William Shakespeare



My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

Charles Baudelaire



To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

Robert Louis Stevenson



Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore.

Vita Sackville-West



What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

George Gordon Noel Byron



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CLARITY

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity.

George Oppen (1908 - 1984)



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FORM

Form is never more than an expression of content.

Charles Olson



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SLANG

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 - 1936)


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TRUTH (3)

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

June Jordan



Poets lie the truth.

Bertus Aafjes



Poetry is closer to vital truth than history is.

Plato



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MUSIC (2)

The poet is a sculptor who paints music.

Clem Schouwenaars



A man should hear a little music, read some poetry, and see a fine picture each day of his life, in order to prevent that worldly worries obliterate the sense of beauty which God has implanted in the human soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



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NUMBERS

The poem rewrites itself
it can't speak
just letters becoming words
like digits a number

Richard Foqué


www.alberthagenaars.nl
http://richardfoque.blogspot.nl

STAMMERING

Poetry wants to say something to us but what it is she wants to say remains hidden, although we feel its presence. It is not vague, on the contrary, it's quite concrete what poems do with us. That’s what makes poetry attractive and therefore I’m inclined to dedicate myself to this higher form of stammering.

Hans Dekkers



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PROTECTION (2)

One has to protect poetry from the poets, because it is the most precious asset we possess.

Marnix Gijsen (1899 - 1984)



The openess of poems, their ambiguity and complexity must be protected. If you try to explain the poem, you frame it. You fixate. Why would you do that?

Mustafa Stitou



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ART

The nice thing about art, so about poetry as well, is that everyone is entitled to abuse it.

Kees Fens



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RELIGION

Poetry is the natural language of all religions.

Germaine de Stael



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ROAD

There are many roads leading to poetry - each real poet clears his own path.

Anestis Evangelou



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INTIMACY

It's much more intimate to read poetry with someone than to sleep together.

Tania De Metsenaere



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STREET

Real poetry walks down the street. What a pity so many poets are looking for it in the clouds.

Alphonse de Lamartine



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PENCIL

Each word you want to keep silent I silence back to you with my pencil.

Hilde Keteleer



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LINE

When I have a final line in mind
I try to write a poem with it
and when I have a first line
it may become a story

sometimes I just have a line.

Frans Mink



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IDEA (2)

Ideas have nothing to do with poetry, what counts is what can't be said.

Max Jacob



I am and will always be A POET and, inflexible, I have always preferred the visual aspects, the ideas, paintings, and the poetry present in them.
Hans Clavin



Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



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PREDICTABILITY

Because nothing is predictable, everything
is realized in what is written.

Paul Rigolle



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TRANSLATING (4)

The best translation is not that which is most like the original but which is the most different from it.

G. Bradford



Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

Leonard Cohen



Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert Frost



What is lost in a good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel



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CONSCIOUSNESS

Poetry acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness.

Percy Bysshe Shelley


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BODY

A room without books is like a body without soul.

Cicero



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DEATH (3)

Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture,
A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

John Ashberry



There are some dead who are more alive than the living.

Jean-Christophe Romain Rolland


A man's life breath cannot come back again-
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.

Homer



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HEART (2)

Once they were mine, these poems.
What they accomplish in heart and eyes now,
I will never know.
When I finished them, they forgot about me.

Jasper Mikkers



You can't find poetry anywhere when you haven't got any poetry in the heart.

Joseph Joubert



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END (2)

One never finishes a poem, one abandons it.

Paul Valéry



The mysterie of creating a work of art: one thinks to know how to begin, one knows where to go – but one never knows where it all ends.

Philippe Cailliau


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MOMENT

Poetry has no standards. Poetry danses on the rhythm of the moment.

Hugo Claus



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COMMAND

As long as the poet writes, he remains in charge. But when the reader reads well, it will be him to command.

Philippe Cailliau



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PAINTING

Painting is writing poetry which can be seen instead of felt and poetry is making a painting which can be felt instead of seen.

Leonardo da Vinci



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GRACE

If there is any relation between poetry and grace, it must be that poetry is grace!

Frère Gilles



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WORDS (9)

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Charles Simic



A poem doesn't only consist of words - it consists of words and their silence.

Martinus Nijhoff



Words may only serve to improve the silence.

Karel Jonckheere



A poem should be wordless as the flight of birds.

Archibald Macleish



For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.

T.S. Eliot



Beautiful words only love themselves.

J.C. van Schagen



'Therefore' is a word the poet should not know.

André Gide



A poet: a person looking for words, a new packaging for his feelings.

Jos Vandeloo



One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Voltaire



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PROSE (3)

One should always be a poet, even in prose.

Charles Baudelaire



You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo



One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Voltaire



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PHILOSOPHY (3)

Many contemporary poets think poetry is a linguistic game. For me it is -other than philosophy but with the same power- a way to deal with the main questions.

Adam Zagajewski



Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history, for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle


Philosophy is the hospital of poetry.

Novalis



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RHYTHM (3)

In my opinion, an aquarium is a small dark water house. The images that you gain in poetry are the light sources that you plant in that aquarium. In it, a kind of rhythm is brought about by the various schools of fish that slide from one light source to another. That mobility can be compared to the musicality that you try to achieve in a poem. Just like such an aquarium, a poem is a closed whole full of rhythm.

Gwy Mandelinck





Poetry has no standards. Poetry danses on the rhythm of the moment.

Hugo Claus





Poetry is a slumbering thought which wakes up on rhythm and sound.

Catharina Boer



www.catharinaboer.nl

SEA

Poetry is the art to catch the sea in a single glass.

Italo Calvino



www.catharinaboer.nl

HOSPITAL

Philosophy is the hospital of poetry.

Novalis



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VAGUENESS

Most people have such a vague idea about poetry, that this vagueness itself becomes the definition of poetry for them.

Paul Valéry



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POWER

When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

President J.F. Kennedy (or his spin doctor)



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EGG

How I write a poem? Quite simply, like a rooster lays an egg.

Martinus Nijhoff



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EXPERIENCE

For poems are not, as people think, feelings (one has them early enough) - they are experiences.

Rainer Maria Rilke



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INSIDE OUT

Poetry is writing inside out.

Teuntje Knöps



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NUANCES

Nuances are everything, in life as well as in language.

Louis Couperus



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SENSES

Love is the poetry of the senses.

Honoré de Balzac



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VITALITY

Sexuality is the poetry of vitality.

George Van Acker



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MERIT

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Voltaire



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PAPER

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, unfortunately, not as easy as looking at it.

Vincent van Gogh



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SILENCE (4)

Poetry is a heightened form of keeping silent.

Norbert De Beule



Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Charles Simic



A poem doesn't only consist of words - it consists of words and their silence.

Martinus Nijhoff



Words may only serve to improve the silence.

Karel Jonckheere



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HISTORY (3)

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history, for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle


Poetry is closer to vital truth than history.

Plato



Poetry provides us with the history of the human heart.


Billy Collins




www.alberthagenaars.nl





Also see:
Dutch poetry in Indonesian language, translated by Siti Wahyuningsih and Albert Hagenaars

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry

MUSIC (2)

The poet is a sculptor who paints music.

Clem Schouwenaars



A man should hear a little music, read some poetry, and see a fine picture each day of his life, in order to prevent that worldly worries obliterate the sense of beauty which God has implanted in the human soul.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



www.alberthagenaars.nl

PACKING

A poet: a person looking for words, a new packaging for his feelings.

Jos Vandeloo



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REALITY

Writing poems is mixing feelings with reality.

Ben Moudhi



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CELLAR

A poem must have at least one cellar.

Paul van Ostaijen



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HOME

My poetry is the only place where I can live.

J.J. Slauerhof



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SONG

Poetry is the song of history.

Ko Un


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IGNORANCE

Poetry is the only domain where ignorance can beat academicism.

Herman De Coninck



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BACKWARD

Poetry is listening backward and looking forward.

Remco Campert



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WOLF

Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.

Vladimir Nabokov



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NEW YEAR

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.

T.S. Eliot



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