‘Poetry makes nothing happenwrote WH Auden. It is precisely him that Babs Gons quotes – with different lines – after a plea for the ability of poetry to actually cause something. The new Poet Laureate hastens to add, as everyone always dutifully does, that poetry of course has no obligation, but she clearly finds it much more pleasant if a poem actually comforts, makes you think, confuses or purifies. She even suggests that people might change their actions after reading a poem.
What exactly is ‘to make happen’, when does something happen? Is comfort or support or something even more indescribable, a glimpse of a possibility, an insight that cannot be told, ‘nothing’? I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think Auden either. Gons himself, in a way that cannot be fully explained, supported Auden’s lines: How should we like it were stars to burn/ With a passion for us we could not return?/ If equal affection cannot be,/ Let the more loving one be me.
A poet like Gerrit Kouwenaar may have actually put off many people, despite his often very strong poems. His poems were and are very highly regarded, but they are not exactly easy to understand and their author often said that he was really opposed to the idea that poetry would provide ‘comfort’.
Now a poem is indeed not a handkerchief and comfort is a difficult concept, but formulations, including those of Kouwenaar, do provide guidance and that is a form of comfort.
There was also Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer who made a lot of noise about everything he called ‘not poetry’: easy poetry, by which he meant ‘intelligible’ poetry, was not poetry, nor was silent poetry and also ‘pimply provoking on a popi stage is not poetry’. The poetry had to be difficult, incomprehensible preferably, even ‘dangerous’ and ‘disturbing’.
I have always found that demand a bit ridiculous: did I really have to imagine that Pfeijffer was worried and unable to sleep after reading a ‘dangerous’ poem?
Poetry is of course always intended as communication in some way, otherwise the poet could keep the words to himself. It is not a problem if communication is difficult, on the contrary, ambiguity is wealth. It is sometimes enormously satisfying and even enlightening when the world is complicated by words and you end up in a domain where there is nothing left but words that have slightly changed the world without you being able to say how, other than with precisely those words. .
But perhaps that is what Pfeijffer meant by ‘disturbing’.
He certainly did not mean the poetry of Babs Gons, and Kouwenaar, we can safely assume, should have none of that either. That kind of poetry spoken word, is also not the kind of poetry I, as a reader more than a listener, am looking for. It is poetry that wants to be understood directly in recitation, and is so, a kind of poetry that does not complicate but names, that makes communication directly possible. But in a different way than a piece of prose. Recited poetry has a very long tradition. I also love Homer, and when someone recites it I enjoy listening. Poetry has all kinds of manifestations and that is a good thing. Perhaps she accomplishes nothing, as Auden claimed. But a good poem always makes something happen. I follow Gon’s entirety in this.
A version of this article also appeared in the October 2, 2023 newspaper.