Rhyme or Riesling
De Australische dichteres Jan Owen schrijft over Maastricht!

Jan Owen

As a member of what Horace called 'the touchy tribe of poets' I was recently invited to Maastricht in the southern tip of the Netherlands. There were thirty of us and no sign of touchiness save the occasional sideways mutter, but then we were continually and liberally pacified with fine food and wine. The Maastricht International Poetry Nights are held biennially, this year from 13 to 16 June in the impressive domed Bonnenfantenmuseum, which was designed by Aldo Rossi and looks rather like Hieronymous Bosch's Beehive with Crotch Monster. The museum is named for the 'good children' of earlier centuries, left in the cloisters nine months after the noblemen of the Netherlands had co me south for the hunting season. Maastricht or 'Maas crossing' grew up round a Roman bridge over the Meuse or Maas River. It is a town of many sieges and has passed to the Spanish and the French, then back to the Dutch, with the Belgians staking a late claim, so it's a confluence of cultures and languages. The local dialect is a mix of Dutch, German and French, with a longer, more melodious lilt than you hear up north. This is as far as the icesheet came so you might say south begins here.

Being early summer and hot already there are tables and chairs under the linden and lime trees in Onze Lieve Vrouweplein, and all are packed with locals, tourists and mugs of beer - Jupiler, Duvel, Maes, Westmalle Trappist (a strong, silent brew) and the lighter, fragrant Vos. The square empties towards nightfall, which is not until ten-thirty or eleven, and the Middle Ages seem to impend in the thirteenthcentury city walls gentled by dandelions and in the fortress-like Basilica of Our Lady with its Romanesque blind arcading. The few people drifting by seem insubstantial; as the Dutch poet Rutger Kopland writes, 'It is not time which passes / but you and I who pass. ’ He is one of the poets speaking and reading this year in Maastricht.

The evening performances are bilinguaI, with the poems read by each poet in his or her language after the Dutch translation. There are some extra versions in English and I can follow the French and Italian readings but this still leaves about twenty-three readings in which I can only guess at the poetry by the person, and by the sound patterns and audience reaction.
        We have been promised 'Burgundian cheer' besides poetry, and the meals before the readings are sumptuous. I try guinea fowl with white asparagus, and the local white wine Hoeve Nekum - Our House, fresh and young like muscadetbut 'more joyful' according to André, a hydrographer, who later gives me a bottle as 'empirical data for the article'. Further down the long table Zoran Anchevski from Macedonia is shifting and wincing; he has a slipped disc and much fortitude. Ethereal Chouchanik Thamrazian from Armenia is already nervous and chain-smoking.

The next night at Gadja Mas we have rijsttafel-rice table, a tradition here, with ikang bali, babi ketjap, sambal goreng, oedang, satay, kroepoek. Then the first of the Poetry Nights: a lecture, an interview and several readings. The audience particulary warms to Tonnus Oosterhoff who gives us his website address; he has a fluid, open attitude to the poems he posts there: words in each line regularly slip away to be replaced by others, a playing with chance and serendipity. Frieda Hughes from the UK has learnt the language of pain early and can make of it a poetry healing for her 'Three Old Ladies':

        Beaks open magiccracks

        like eggshell in their dry throats
        Three marsh birds spit blood at their hospital sheets.

Eric Stinus, author of twenty – two books, reads in Danish; I note complex syntactical patterns, strong rhythms, crisp diction and a fine use of silence and timing. Alas, I cannot understand a word.

Breakfast under the chandeliers of the Hotel Beaumont takes a good hour and is the main opportunity to talk shop with, for instance, Paulo Ruffilli from Treviso. He tells me his work is influenced by Taoism (he has translated the Tao Te Ching into Italian verse) and that he aims to create his poems as spaces opening onto further spaces, which sounds rather like Chinese boxes raised an octave.
        In the afternoons there are school sessions with Henk van Kerkwijk, Bies van Ede, Ulrich Gabriel and Paul van Loon. Ulrich from Austria uses music, mime and syllable poetry to involve the children. He is developing a sort of sign poetry to cut across language barriers. We talk about clowning and pictograms; my ideas of maths and symbolic logic in poetry do not faze him. More than ever I realise how sound patterns, musicality and rhythm in the poem flavour the meaning. And also how much is lost in translation; one particular line of mine loses five of its six connotations in the Dutch version.
        Dinner that evening is at Quattro Mori where Paulo is in his element and insists I try the scampi, which comes in a rich wine and tomato sauce. I share the salad and chips with Duoduo, who left Peking after the Tienanmen Square massacre. I ask him about Fa!un Gong. 'It will finish communism, ’ he says, ‘in ten years at most, maybe five. And largely because it was opposed by communism. I think of the Taoist saying 'Govern a large state as you would fry a small fish - as little as possible. ’ The prawns are cooked on Taoist principles anyway.
        A couple of hours later the Russian poet Gennadij Ajgi is telling us of the vast spaces of Russia and of the central importance of stillness in his work; his is a mystical poetry of snow and air and forest: 'What am I / in this silence-as in the full Light?/ Or in the Fire. ' Amir Or from Israel reads English versions of some of his poems so I don't miss his obliquity and edge or his more direct and emphatic lines. In 'Job Blues':

        He was fired and free.
        The face of the waters exploded and turned blue.
        He stood there like a gutter and urinated at length.
        He had no shirt. He was cold.

I can also follow William Cliff from Brussels who is afflicted by nasal polyps. They make him sound like Jacques Brel. He tells me that’s ni consolation. As I expected, he is sardonic and provocative: 'Why do we buy gas from the Hollanders?’implying in the French ‘Why must we cop hot air from the Dutch?'
        Yesterday I had to fend off negative leading questions like 'Our most eminent Dutch critic says that poetry tends towards no meaning' and 'We are told 'the author is dead” – please account for why you write. ' But I am finding meaning in abundance in what I am hearing, even as whispered translations while the poets read. I am also becoming more and more impressed by how the poetry seems to fit the person. Haris Vlaviano embodies the precision and poise of his words:

        He moves through the labyrinth
        is not in search of the truth
        but of his Ariadne

Foutez le camp, M. Barthes: the Author is alive!

Peter van Nunen offers to take me with Gennadij on a tour of the Old Town. We start on the Rive Gauche, the newer part of town, reconstructed ten years ago. Under the thirteenth-century water gate there is a crow picking over a white-bellied eel. Peter points out the spire of the City Hall copied by Peter the Great for the main monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church. We follow the walls to the Gate of Hell; just inside is a slightly tawdry Dico Heaven. Nearby is a potent anti-sculpture- a glassed-over hole in the wall of a new building just where the old wall would once have passed. And a plaque: Ik ben niet zo als ik was -absence given a voice.
        Dark red climbing roses frame the door of the seventeenth-century Faliezusters Klooster or Veiled Sisters’ Cloister. How roses and ivy love history! We pass the museum that houses bits and pieces of the city's famous monster, Bèr, a twenty-metre mosasaurus or Meuse lizard, and come to Heksenstraat, Witches' street , with the white house of one witch leaning into an outlet of the little River Jeker, which gushes up here and there only to sweep underground again. The witch herself, now just a stucco relief on a wall, is a hunched figure on her phallic broom; that inverted symbol of cleanliness and woman's duty must have seemed all the more subversive centuries ago in house-proud Holland.
        In Hotel Derlon we go underground to the Roman road in the cellar, to the pavement and temple square and well and little second-century shop: two thousand years compacted down do six metres of light and dark layers. You never knok what you will find if you start digging a cellar here. Up into sunshine dappling through the acacia and catalpa trees, with red scooters left and right and a Russian folk band in the Kersenmarkt. Two covered barges are just sliding downriver under the bridge. It is rowdy already around John Mullins Irish Pub, but then airily serene as we arrive outside town among the rye and poppies on Mount St Peter which, at three hundred metres above sea level, is the highest point in the Netherlands. We are standing above a labyrinth - twenty thousand passages in four galleries of quarried caves. But we decide against Ariadne in favour of the poppies.

The last evening begins with a Dutch smorgasbord; the writers who have already done their turn are drinking strenuously; we have been given a liberal supply of drink vouchers as a part of the hospitality of our hosts, notably Hans van de Waarsenburg in his Aristide Bruant hat. Performance styles vary widely, even Ulrike Draesner from Germany upstages her translator with a gangly puppy on a long leash. I am waiting for him to pee on the mike but Lily, the treasurer, stalks up and leads him away. Chouchanik, gathered into herself, reads hypnotically in French, half-veiled by her long dark hair; surreal images thread each other in nervous acrobacy: 'Anima, sad animal of crystal, your gesture is desperate. ’Le style c' est la femme. Rutger Kopland reads many of his poems in English as well as Dutch. He reminds me a little of Wallace Stevens in his balance of questioning and measured reflection.

After the young Dutch poets' session on the Sunday afternoon there is a pizza party in a ferny garden under a wisp of moon. André and Snezana, who like my quince poem, insist that I should try their palinka, Hungarian quince brandy.
        So André arrives at the hotel next morning with a cushion strapped onto the pillion of his bike. Another truly Dutch experience. It is a cobbly winding ride clutching his belt and keeping my balance, feet turned up like a Balinese dancer. On the footpath outside his door is a multicoloured chalk tribute with hearts and André-Papa, GelukkigeVaderdag! Sunday is Father's Day here. Snezana takes me out into the shady garden and we talk about whales and ravens and Canada, ~hermeneutics (I listen) and history as a long wave. André enjoins me, enthusiastically any, to read Gadamer and Braudel. And I will. Árpád arrives and the palinka is brought forth. We sip it reverently - pure spirit of autumn. A little more all round and André, who grew up in South Africa, begins demonstrating the tongue clicks of the XHosa. Church bells close by are sounding out ‘Frère Jacques’. Karl Popper the cat stretches and yawns and we turn on the TV in time do see Rinaldo’s clinching goal against Belgium.

On the way do the station later I stop at a patisserie for a pyramid, a grenache and a frangipan, then have to eat them at one sitting on the train to Utrecht as it is a humid thirty – three degrees and the chocolate is melting. I am going back to my friends Marian and Frits in Wijk bij Duurrstede with its horse-chestnut trees and doves and moated castle and thinking of that Hole in the Wall and Rutger Kopland’s 'Outside cour thoughts there is no time. ' I don't know, it's as good a concept as any for how things change. Among the thirty or so poets reading at Maastricht there would be thirty different theories of time. Along with 'the self' it’s our obsession. Heidegger reckons time is the horizon of being, but we still keep trying do see beyond like hopeful little tadpoles mouthing the meniscus. I sip at the the last of the cakes, which is dripping with cherry liqueur