Remco Campert has devoted his life to describing what falls between the communicable: life before and after the event, life in the void. He gives words to the hours that come together during which nothing happens that you could or would like to retell in a conversation. In doing so, what otherwise seems vague or unimportant – and usually takes up most of a life – takes on form and meaning.
It almost makes me believe that it’s okay that I haven’t attended an event again, haven’t experienced an adventure. It’s okay if I spent hours staring dazed at a coat in the corner of the room and it faded and became sharp again depending on how I ran my eyes over the fabric. That I recognized a body, a city, Remco Campert in it.
sweet coat
the one on a chair in the hotel room
just laying there
recover from the rain
that quickly stained you
a storm blew over Java
old ashes flew up
and covered your lapel
weeks later in another country
you smell a bit like your fabric
and to my wandering through the city
I also detect
the simple scent of perfume
that passed me
when I crossed
and turned around too late
In the series of eight poems that Ode to my coat (1997), almost everything that characterizes Campert’s poetry is discussed. A description of the immediate environment with the city as background, the individual who resignedly lets reality come over him like rain. The jacket is a jacket, but also a sweet jacket. The garment offers protection against the outside world, and eventually becomes a skin. The poet becomes his coat:
sometimes it’s just a sigh
that you caress
when you turn the corner
then another raging storm
who fights against you
but the corner you turn
stays the same
the built endures
long after me and my shell
have perished
When I read Campert, I often think of the Chinese poet Bay Juyi (772-846), who expressed everyday matters with clear language, such as the grayness and dullness of his office. Because Campert’s language is stripped of all frills, so direct and simple that nothing can become obsolete, his poetry – like Juyi’s – has eternal value. We can still read it twelve centuries from now and marvel at the fact that a poet wrote about something as ordinary as a coat and that he succeeds – with a deliberate minimum of poetic means – in transforming the coat into a person, into life and finally to the poetry itself:
to write poetry
that goes with you like a coat
i hate you sometimes
I always have to pay attention
so that I don’t forget you
sometimes you’re waiting
in dusty corners
through you, sheath,
I experience life
in person
I grow in your shape
what i’m looking for more and more
In his poetry, Campert has increasingly perfected himself in perpetuating the apparently trivial. The fact that this ultimately results in unforgettable events is due to the openness of the poet and the light and musical character of his use of language.
The transformation that was initially enforced within the poem, eventually takes place between the poem and the reader. To be so trusted by the poet is a privilege. The ultimate transformation can begin, as in ‘Paper’ (2015):
one more word more words
and now it’s a rule
more rules and now it’s
a made poem
Airplanes
leave their tracks in the air
that are erased in the wind.
Then the sky will be perfectly smooth again
and can it start again