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| POETRY
IN THE NETHERLANDS AS IT IS TODAY
Or, better said: THE POETS FROM EPIBREREN
What you are about to see on Wednesday August 23rd 2000 is a performance
of the Poets from Epibreren. You may like it, you may dislike it
- though that?s not what matters. What matters is the question:
how and why the Poets from Epibreren perform as they do?
It all started in 1980 with a television broadcast of a performance
by the Rotterdam poet Jules Deelder. Dressed in a suit, with tie
and all, he was seen reading his poetry at a punk festival. People
spat and threw bottles of beer at him, but he didn?t stop. With
almost satanical determination he persevered.
Justus Anton Deelder - his full Christian name - was born in Rotterdam
in November, 1944. The Germans then still occupied this big harbour
city, the second biggest city of the Netherlands. Deelder luckily
survived the war and started to write poetry while in secondary
school. At a young age he debuted with a poem in a national newspaper.
When he was 21 he was asked to perform on the first modern scale
poetry festival organised in The Netherlands, Poëzie in Carré, in
the Amsterdam Carré Theatre. organised by the Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog
(1928) and a man called Olivier Boelen, it attracted almost 2000
people and was well covered by the media. Shortly afterwards Deelder
could publish his first poetry collection with one of the bigger
publishing companies.
Deelder, and one of the other poets reading at that festival, Johnny
van Doorn (1944-1991), always bestowed much care on their performance.
They gave a great deal of thought to the means how to make their
poetry come ?alive? whilst performing.
This was not a new idea. Other poets, like Simon Vinkenoog and Lucebert
(1924-1994) were well known for their flamboyant readings. The most
important thing about Van Doorn and Deelder was that they picked
up the tradition and worked with this tradition in mind and kept
it alive.
Where Johnny van Doorn more or less stopped writing poetry and started
to write mainly prose, Jules Deelder developped his skills in both
directions. During the seventies he and Johnny van Doorn continued
reading in the Netherlands. Around 1980 - when the previously mentioned
television broadcast took place - Deelder and Van Doorn became the
godfathers of a younger generation of poets: Bart Chabot (1954)
and Diana Ozon (1959). They read their poetry at punk festivals,
cultural youth centres and so on and they called themselves the
?Poppoets?, from ?populair poets?, because they brought poetry back
to the people, where most settled poets were only interested in
reading to other settled poets and small audiences and not giving
any thought at all about the best ways to read their poems in public.
As a young boy of 14 years old, already writing poetry myself, I
heard of these poets, read their poetry and thought: ?Hey, that?s
the way to do it?. A year later, in 1981, I performed for the first
time, in a youth club, as the supporting act of a befriended punk
band. I soon became involved in the punk and squatters movement,
so most of my readings were at punk festivals and in squat houses.
My poetry was basically political poetry, telling the people about
the wickedness of the political system, that kind of work. But,
as I became more and more experienced, I started to realize that
writing or preaching ?politically correct? poetry meant a dead end:
it?s just too simple. You know beforehand how a punk audience will
react to a poem stating: ?Fuck the State?. They will love it. It?s
just as cheap as making poetry filled with sex and genitals: the
audience loves it, but it means nothing. So I tried to write poetry
which wasn?t stating ?this is good and that is bad?, but left room
for the audience - be it at present at the performance or reading
it at home.
I was at that time, in 1993, a poet like so many others: now and
then performing, publishing only in small magazines, knowing only
two collegue poets (who lived in Amsterdam and Rotterdam) and printing
now and then poetry booklets of my own poetry.
Then something happened which radically changed my life and - I?m
proud to say - a part of the outlook of Dutch poetry. I was invited
to perform at an art party in an old country-house, a few kilometres
south of Groningen city. I was not the only poet to perform at this
place. Three other young Groningen poets, just like me from Groningen
city, were asked to perform as well. We had never met before.
So we discussed how we could perform together and we decided that
each of us would read a poem, then another poet would read and so
on. Because in the same room where we were to perform a drum group
also had to play, we decided to interweave the drums and poetry.
Not knowing then anything about the Last Poets from New York who
have a similar show since the late 1960?s - but that?s quite a different
story.
Anyhow, this resulted in something quite amazing: the audience loved
it. They loved it because they constantly got new input: every passing
minute they would hear another voice, another sound, see constantly
changing speakers and musicians, just as they were accustomed to
when watching television.
In the months to follow we worked on the act, keeping constantly
in mind that we had to be as varying as possible. Just as the cinema
in the 20th century had developed from very long shots more and
more into shorter shots, we wanted to introduce the tempo of the
day into our poetry shows. Because nowadays it?s very hard for most
people to concentrate longer than a few minutes.
We also realized that we had all the time to think about new things
in our performance to keep the attention of the audience. We started
experimenting with two gogo dancers: two beautiful scarcely clothed
girls dancing on stage during our performance. This worked very
well in one of the prisons we performed in, needless to say why.
Later on we had two inflatable seals (one exploded during a school
performance in The Netherlands, the other exploded in a theatre
in Portugal) and now we have our two furbies. Not only do these
?gadgets? liven up the stage, they also serve to attract the media.
Which we need to attract audience to our performances.
As mentioned before during our first performance we were accompanied
by a drum group. One of its members joined the group of poets and
played didjeridoo during our shows, to add atmosphere to poetry.
This original musician, Martijn Woldring, was replaced in 1996 by
our current musician Jan Klug, who tries to create soundscapes under
the poems so that sounds and poetry come together and can more or
less hypnotize the audience, without it being necessary that the
audience fully comprehends the poems. The atmosphere, that?s the
main thing for us.
We are not the only poets from the younger generation experimenting
with music and trying to make something out of their readings or
performances. Dutch poets like Serge van Duijnhoven, Arjan Witte,
Ingmar Heytze, Hagar Peeters, Tommy Wieringa and Menno Wigman are
fine examples of new shoots from the ancient tree of performing
poetry in the Netherlands.
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