J. BERNLEF (5)

How do I proceed? In any case, that is different with poetry and prose. Poetry is often present from a hunch, an image or a first sentence. Then you know that you have to put everything aside immediately and work on it, because in the early stages it is often so fleeting that you lose it in no time. A novel doesn't overwhelm you in that way.


From an interview in Poëziekrant, September 1986





Poetry for me is a matter of observing, and although the non-recognition of two identical objects remains a utopia, somewhere there lies the starting point of what I now call originality: a matter of forgetting, almost.


From the book 'Wie a zegt', 1970





Poetry is information, but information of a different order than the encyclopedic, the scientific or the journalistic, which makes the unknown known, gives it names.





Only in the poem does reality emerge. The more that reality 'seemingly' resembles the surrounding reality, the more effectively the poem will demonstrate the double meaning of that concept; mimicry is not just a fascinating biological phenomenon.





Poetry is of magical origin, and although we are far from the rain-singing and poetry-reciting shaman, one of the elements nonetheless remains the more or less incantatory speech about everything that humanity does not have in its own hands: a large part of its life course and the timing of its death. Although we no longer believe that death can be overcome in a poem, a poem can still give us a moment of 'timelessness', as it is called, rising above its words. There is more than what is said.





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



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