PLACE

Often, a place that starts a poem for me is one I have only glimpsed while passing through. It should make impression enough that I can see things in the town-the water tower, the bank, the last movie announced on the marquee before the theater shut down for good, the closed hotel-long after I've left. Sometimes these are imagined things I find if I go back, but real or imagined, they act as a set of stable knowns that sit outside the poem. They and the town serve as a base of operations for the poem. Sometimes they serve as a stage setting. I would never try to locate a serious poem in a place where physical evidence suggests that the people there find it relatively easy to accept themselves-say the new Hilton. The poet's relation to the triggering subject should never be as strong as (must be weaker than) his relation to his words. The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts. For example, if the poem needs the word "black" at some point and the grain elevator is yellow, the grain elevator may have to be black in the poem. You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.


Richard Hugo



Also see:

Frozen poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

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

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



www.alberthagenaars.nl

MISTRESS

Poetry isn’t a profession / It’s not knitting // It might be a mistress.


Maarten Embrechts



Also see:

Frozen poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

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

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



www.alberthagenaars.nl

NOTHING (2)

The poem doesn’t know anything, proclaims nothing, preaches nothing and teaches nothing. It can’t be used for any useful purpose whatsoever, it’s doesn’t serve to embellish life, it gives no worldly wisdom. It is good for nothing, it has worth in itself. It doesn’t replace anything, it doesn’t inform. The poem is in a state of zero gravity and yet carries weight. It is nothing and nevertheless entails all.


Leo Herberghs





Poetry makes nothing happen.


W.H. Auden


Also see:

Frozen poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

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

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



www.alberthagenaars.nl

OPAQUE

A poet shouldn't flatter through familiarity. Aristotle already knew that the poetic must have something inexplicable, something opaque.


José De Poortere


Also see:

Frozen poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

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

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



www.alberthagenaars.nl

LIGHTNING

Poetry is a vertical lightning strike, the novel is a horizontal, never-ending line.


Victor van Vriesland


Also see:

Frozen poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

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

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



www.alberthagenaars.nl

EARTH (4)

A poem / that understands itself and purely / encompasses itself like a figure of speech / with a ball and with air // and then takes flight because / of so little earth—I gladly / let it ascend to heaven. By preference // including the poet himself.

Frank Pollet





The poet's word is the entire world. Not the tangible earth, not the fluid water, but the earth inside the earth and the water that makes the water fluid.


Paul Snoek





Writing poetry is producing a single leaf of all the woods on earth, producing a single ear of corn of all the grain fields on earth.


Herman van den Bergh





Poetry is an animal, a combination / of the softest animals on earth.


Ben Cami





www.alberthagenaars.nl


Also see:
Frozen poets - Statues, tombs and other traces of hundreds of poets

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

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry

INTUITION

What turns a verse into a poem is precisely the sense of inner necessity with which intuition unfolds, in sharp contrast to the deliberate intent with which one undertakes an experiment.


Hendrik de Vries


Also see:

Frozen poets - Sculptures, graves and other traces of poets

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

Critical reviews on modern Dutch poetry



www.alberthagenaars.nl