Astrid Lampe writes “with diabolic intensity” in “sensuous and indomitable language that requires rereading and relistening,” according to the jury of the PC Hooft Prize. It will go to Lampe next year, it was announced on Wednesday morning. Lampe (1955) is the sixth female poet to receive the annual literary oeuvre prize, an amount of 60,000 euros.
She is not a poet known for beautiful, sweet or clear poetry. Her oeuvre, comprising thirteen collections, is “strikingly unconventional”, according to the jury. “How do I read this?” Lampe himself already wrote in the collection Sister city 2.0 (2018). Her prompt for an answer: “go with it,” she wrote, “and keep gauging the gold content/ of prefab ornaments.” In other words: stay alert to kitsch.
“I am concerned with what moves people,” she said in an interview more than twenty years ago. “What moves me and what that emotion consists of.” But that did not mean that her poems are confessions of her personal soul stirrings, where kitsch lurks. In that interview, Lampe also strongly opposed “the misunderstanding that poetry is something like: beautifully expressing something deeply felt.” The wording had to be an experience, but not by referring to ‘something’ that conveyed the feeling.
And beautiful’? In her debut collection Rib (1997), Lampe already used that word in a poem about a museum visit. There ‘beautiful’ sounded like a ‘courtship call’ from the visitors, a scent flag that is also a killer. Because that word “measures eyeless / beautiful beautiful stiffens the kiss of death / beautiful beautiful impales butterflies to life / nods their heads.”
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Downy chick
Lampe wants to capture life in her wild, musical verses. In Rib she wrote about a fluffy chick that first has to break out of an egg: “yesterday’s rules/ I introduce as singing seeds/ to rule-breaking/ fresh/ today// so that: it is possible again, it is allowed again/ an egg’s courage remains / us blow-dry ready the down wake-/ light around the heart”. You can read it as a metaphor for the poet who continues and breaks tradition in order to be able to sing his own song.
Lampe did not do this without a struggle, although there was immediate appreciation for her poetry collections, in which that life-affirming lyricism played the leading role. “This poetry hides nothing but spreads words, sounds and meanings with a generous hand,” wrote the jury of the Ida Gerhardt Poetry Prize, which Lampe (“language engineer and language musician”) received for her collection Spray your RAL color (2005).
Yet many critic had also become dizzy, searching for the meaning of her rather hermetic lyricism: Piet Gerbrandy once sighed that Lampe would have to read her poems, “because then you would not, like trained poetry readers, have the need to understand every line.” .
It was necessary to fold. But as long as you, like Lampe, use existing words, lines of poetry are more than their sound. Lampe himself took the fact that meaning can also be given to seemingly randomly assembled language as a starting point for the collection Mourning with animals (2013). In it she ‘sampled’ from anthologies: she built new constellations from existing lines of poetry. “She allows lyricism and found language to merge, leaving no register unused,” said the PC Hooft jury. “The result is an open text, a language that is aware of itself and its boundaries.”
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the review of Lampe’s collection ‘Tulpenvodka’ by Maria Barnas
Increasingly more activist
What are those limits? What can language do? Over the past decade, Lampe’s poetry has focused more on the current outside world – modern times flooded her poems, from Amazon to the lone wolf, baristas and the World Bank. It became poetry that did not accept the status quo, a chaotic world that Lampe saw struggling under climate change, capitalism and totalitarian technology.
Could the disruption of poetry, an ‘open’ text, perhaps change the minds of so conditioned people? In Tulip vodka (2021), people have gone into lockdown, and Lampe’s story extended beyond the corona pandemic: “in the dominant story, the oil is Viagra/ the mood is stock market related/ a grave mood.” Lampe has gradually become more activist, her fight against kitsch and fake increasingly outward-looking. In Sister city 2.0 it was already about a group of poets who visit a desert city together. Are they doing something good, something meaningful? In any case, they continue to go against the current, looking for fertile grounds: “now that the mainstream/ continues to lead the crowd downtown/ we take like a hare this salmon ladder/ and shortest route to the spawning grounds.”
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