if you read poetry, you can’t understand it and still find it beautiful’

Nice and warm or stuffy?

‘This is exactly why I for It’s hot in the hivemind have chosen as title: because warm can convey both tightness and security. It is a multilingual collection of long poems and pictures about the internet and what growing up as a girl or young woman means in our day and age. I mean actually girlhoodthat word is difficult to translate.

‘The title comes from the last poem. It’s a phrase by which I refer to the feeling that other poets are thinking similar things to me, and that I find that both cozy and oppressive, or even a little threatening. That applies at all to being part of a hiveminda collective brain like the internet, a group of people, a generation – you can do anything one hivemind to call. A collective can offer connection, but can also feel oppressive, so that you no longer know who you are.

‘The collection is fragmented with a lot of found language: quotes from academic theorists, pop artists, a few canonical poets, texts from tweets or memes. And I think, or so other people have told me, that makes reading a bit like the internet itself, like the feeling you get when you’re scrolling, clicking through and seeing things both beautiful and ugly. I also find that experience both oppressive and attractive: being swallowed up by the internet, information overload†

Poetry in Dutch or English?

‘Dutch, but there is a lot of English in the collection. As a teenager I only wrote in English. At a certain point I rediscovered Dutch. Because I found it interesting to return to my native language, but also for pragmatic reasons: I wanted to write things in a local context, where I could build a community and a career, be eligible for prizes, apply for grants.

‘When can you still call a bundle a Dutch-language bundle? A sentence with one English word is a Dutch sentenceI guess† A poem with one English sentence too. But what if you have an English poem with three Dutch sentences, and you place it in a collection published by a Dutch publisher?

‘When I was looking for a publisher and I was working on the manuscript, I thought: there must be nothing in English in it. A line here and there, but not a whole poem. De Bezige Bij didn’t bother about that.’ Laughs: ‘So then I thought: how much English can I cycle in until I can no longer win a prize for the best Dutch-language poetry debut? But I am also loyal to Dutch, and I also want to protect that language against Anglicization – that’s why I now write Dutch poems with a lot of English in them, instead of English poems like I used to.

‘I do have a theory about my love for English. As a child it became an escapist comfort language for me. Simply because it was a different language, it provided an escape route from everyday life and the world around me. Apparently I needed that. It may also have to do with the fact that my father is not Dutch, he is Uruguayan. I was not raised in Spanish, I learned that language later.’

On Instagram or not?

Like most people on Instagram, I have an ambivalent relationship with it. I think I’d be happier without it. I’ve created a bubble, kind of a nice warm hivemind, by following accounts that I find pleasantly stimulating, lots of funny meme accounts. But in between come the reels, the videos that Instagram shows you unsolicited based on your algorithm. In my case, that’s a lot of videos of people trying out filters, filters that make your face more symmetrical or your lips fuller.

‘I like the contrast between the feed curated by myself and that one reels quite big. I find the vain side of Instagram less fascinating and also harmful. I used to be concerned with looks and beauty, but since social media I have discovered insecurities that I never thought I would have to worry about. While I do know: if you take a nice selfie of yourself, you’re beautiful in that selfie, that has little to do with how you look when you walk through the supermarket.’

Hear or read a poem?

‘When I won the NK Poetry Slam in 2019, an interviewer asked me if I planned to continue performing. Then I replied something like, “I’m writing poems right now that I don’t even know how to read.” These are poems in the collection, with many punctuation marks and symbols. How do you pronounce it?

‘For me it has always been more important that a poem is beautiful to read than beautiful to hear. I wrote the rhythmic slam poems of that time with the idea of ​​reciting them. I think that’s why they are sometimes less layered. The text is written in such a way that you can get a little bit of everything when you hear it once.

‘I raised one feminist slam poem that I often recited for the collection, mad girl theory is called. Of that poem I often had the feeling that people were clapping for it mainly because it is feminist. I think you can get away with a less beautiful form faster if people agree with the content.’

‘A reading experience that is violently shot from never to nowhere like a steel ball in a pinball machine’ or ‘a boisterous call to revolution’?

‘The first sentence, from a review by Meander Magazine which was very negative. The writer of that review found it problematic that he couldn’t always tell who is speaking in my poems: me or ‘an English-language clipping newspaper in cyberspace’.

‘I don’t mind that it was an unsatisfying reading experience for him, because I don’t try to satisfy by his standards. What exactly did he write, ‘from never to nowhere’? I think ‘never’ and ‘nowhere’ are the best places to be. Much in this book I have written against the expectations of what poetry should be. If old, traditional poetry in this metaphor stands for ‘somewhere’, then I don’t want to go there. Actually, that review said: you succeeded exactly in what you tried to do, but I don’t like that at all. That’s okay, tastes differ. It’s a nice picture what he paints there, that steel ball in a pinball machine.’

Accessible or hermetic?

‘In the last poem there are two words in Greek. There’s a whole story behind that, it’s a reference to a book I read. For those Greek words I asked a friend who speaks Greek to think about the right words, with the idea in my head: a reader who is very committed could retype this if he wants to know what it says. That reminds me of those children’s books in which you can slide something away on the page, and then there is something underneath.

“I hope that readers never get the feeling that they have to look up all the references or words that they don’t know. When it comes to poetry, people often feel that they have to understand everything, the same way you understand a news story. My experience is: if you read poetry, you can’t understand it and still find it beautiful. I don’t really understand a lot of poetry I read. But I hang on to something, I find a hook. That could be: I understand what you’re saying, and I like what you’re saying. Or: I don’t understand what you’re saying at all, but this word sounds nice, or this sentence appeals to the imagination.’

Psychologist or writer?

‘A writer, apparently, but I’ve considered studying psychology. As a writer you can enjoy psychology, although in the future I will have to go a bit more in the fictional direction. I like to create characters and run with them, like you used to play with dolls.

‘I think every young poet writes therapeutically, pouring his last heartbreak into a poem about a tree. All the problems I had in high school I tried to understand and work out through poems about trees – I never actually used trees literally, anyway. Now I’m also talking about patriarchy, capitalism and climate change, but it’s still therapeutic to process life with metaphors.’