woensdag 30 januari 2013

Joseph Brodsky - Lullaby of Cape Cod

For A.B.

I
The eastern tip of the Empire dives into night;
cicadas fall silent over some empty lawn;
on classic pediments inscriptions dim from the sight
as a final cross darkens and then is gone
like the nearly empty bottle on the table.
From the empty street’s patrol car a refrain
of Ray Charles’s keyboard tinkles away like rain.

Crawling to a vacant beach from the vast wet
of ocean, a crab digs into sand laced with sea lather
and sleeps. A giant clock on a brick tower
rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.
The streetlamps glisten in the stifling weather,
formally spaced,
like white shirt buttons open to the waist.

It’s stifling. The eye’s guided by a blinking stoplight
in its journey to the whiskey across the room
on the nightstand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its dull boom
goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,
comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,
rolled-up road map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.

It’s strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.
Dust settles on furnishings, and a car bends length
around corners in spite of Euclid. And the deepened
darkness makes up for the absence of people, of voices,
and so forth, and alters them, by its cunning and strength,
not to deserters, to ones who have taken flight,
but rather to those now disappeared from sight.

It’s stifling. And the thick leaves’ rasping sound
is enough all by itself to make you sweat.
What seems to be a small dot in the dark
could only be one thing – a star. On the deserted ground
of a basketball court a vagrant bird has set
its fragile egg in the steel hoop’s raveled net.
There’s a smell of mint now, and of mignonette.

II
Like a despotic Sheik, who can be untrue
to his vast seraglio and multiple desires
only with a harem altogether new,
varied, and numerous, I have switched Empires.
A step dictated by the acrid, live
odor of burning carried on the air
from all four quarters ( a time for silent prayer!)
and, from the crow’s high vantage point, from five.

Like a snake charmer, like the Pied Piper of old,
playing my flute I passed the green janissaries,
my testes sensing their poleaxe’s sinister cold,
as when one wades into water. And then with the brine
of seawater sharpness filling, flooding the mouth,
I crossed the line

and sailed into muttony clouds. Below me curled
serpentine rivers, roads bloomed with dust, ricks yellowed,
and everywhere in that diminished world,
in formal opposition, near and far,
lined up like print in a book about to close,
armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows
and cities all went dark as caviar.

And then the darkness thickened. All lights fled,
a turbine droned, a head ached rhytmically,
and space backed up like a crab, time surged ahead
into first place and, streaming westwardly,
seemed to be heading home, void of all light,
soiling its garments with the tar of night.

I fell asleep. When I awoke to the day,
magnetic north had strengthened its deadly pull.
I beheld new heavens, I beheld the earth made new.
It lay turning to dust, as flat things always do.

III
Being itself the essence of all things,
solitude teaches essentials. How gratefully the skin
receives the leathery coolness of its chair.
Meanwhile, my arm, off in the dark somewhere,
goes wooden in sympathetic brotherhood
with the chair’s listless arm of oaken wood.
A glowing oaken grain
cover the tiny bones of the joints. And the brain
knocks like the glass’s ice cube tinkling.

It’s stifling. On a pool hall’s steps, in a dim glow,
somebody striking a match rescues his face
of an old black man from the enfolding dark
for a flaring moment. The whithe-toothed portico
of the District Courthouse sinks in the thickened lace
of foliage, and awaits the random search
of passing headlights. High up on its perch,

like the fiery warning at Balthazar’s Feast,
the inscription Coca-Cola hums in red.
In the Country Club’s unweeded flower bed
a fountain whispers its secrets. Unable to rouse
a simple tirralirra in these dull boughs,
a strengthless breeze rustles the tattered, creased
news of the world, its obsolete events,
against an improvised, unlikely fence

of iron bedsteads. It’s stifling. Leaning on his rifle,
the Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.
Against a concrete jetty, in dull repose
a trawler scrapes the rusty bridge of its nose.
A weary, buzzing ventilator mills
the U.S.A.’s hot air with metal gills.

Like a carried-over number in addition,
the sea comes up in the dark
and on the beach it leaves its delible mark,
and the unvarying, diastolic motion,
the repetitious, drugged sway of the ocean,
cradles a splinter adrift for a million years.
If you step sideways off the pier’s
edge, you’ll continue to fall toward those tides
for a long, long time, your hand stiff at your sides,
but you will make no splash.

IV
The change of Empires is intimately tied
to the hum of words, the soft, fricative spray
of spittle in the act of speech, the whole
sum of Lobachevsky’s angles, the strange way
that parallels may unwittingly collide
by casual chance someday
as longitudes contrive to meet at the pole.

And the change is linked as well to the chopping of wood,
to the tattered lining of life turned inside out
and thereby changed to a garment dry and good
(to tweed in winter, linnen in a heat spell),
and the brain’s kernel hardening in its shell.

In general, of all our organs the eye
alone retains its elasticity,
pliant, adaptive as a dream or wish.
For the change of Empires is linked with far-flung sight,
with the long gaze cast across the ocean’s tide
(somewhere within us lives a dormant fish),
and the mirror’s revelation that the part in your hair
that you meticulously placed on the left side
mysteriously shows up on the right,

linked to weak gums, to heartburn brought about
by a diet unfamiliar and alien,
to the intense blankness, to the pristine white
of the mind, which corresponds to the plain, small
blank page of letter paper on which you write.
But now the giddy pen
points out resemblances, for after all

the device in your hand is the same old pen and ink
as before, the woodland plants exhibit no change
of leafage, and the same old bombers range
the clouds toward who knows what
precisely chosen, carefully targeted spot.
And what you really need now is a drink.

V
New England towns seem much as if they were cast
ashore along its coastline, beached by a flood
tide, and shining in darkness mile after mile
with imbricate, speckled scales of shingle and tile,
like schools of sleeping fish hauled in by the vast
nets of a continent that was first discovered
by herring and by cod.

But neither cod nor herring have had any noble statues raised
in their honor, even though the memorial date
could be comfortably omitted. As for the great
flag of the place, it bears no blazon or mark
of the first fish-founder among its parallel bars,
and as Louis Sullivan might perhaps have said,
seen in the dark,
it looks like a sketch of towers thrust among stars.

Stifling. A man on his porch has wound a towel
around his troath. A pitifull, small moth
batters the window screen and bounces off
like a bullet that Nature has zeroed in on itself
from an invisible ambush,
aiming for some improbable bull’s-eye
right smack in the middle of July.

Because watches keep ticking, pain washes away
with the years. If time picks up the knack
of panacea, it’s because time can’t abide
being rushed, of finally turns insomniac.
And walking or swimming, the dreams of one hemisphere (heads)
swarm with the nightmares, the dark, sinister play
of its opposite (tails), its double, its underside.

Stifling. Great motionless plants. A distant bark.
A nodding head now jerks itself upright
to keep faces and phone numbers from sliding into the dark
and off the precarious edge of memory.
In genuine tragedy
it’s not the fine hero that finally dies, it seems,
but, from constant wear and tear, night after night,
the old stage set itself, giving way at the seams.

VI
Since it’s too late by now to say goodbye
and expect from time and space any reply
except an echo that sounds like “Here’s your tip”,
pseudo-majestic, cubing every chance
word that escapes the lip,
I write in a sort of trance,

I write these words out blindly, the scrivening hand
attempting to outstrip
by a second the “How come?”
that at any moment might escape the lip,
the same lip of the writer,
and sail away into night, there to expand
by geometrical progress, und so weiter.

I write from an Empire whose enormous flanks
extend beneath the sea. Having sampled two
oceans as well as continents, I feel that I know
what the globe itself must feel: there’s nowhere to go.
Elsewhere is nothing more than a far-flung strew
of stars, burning away.

Better to use a telescope to see
a snail self-sealed to the underside of a leaf.
I always used to regard “infinity”
as the art of splitting a liter into three
equal components with a couple of friends
without a drop left over. Not, through a lens,
an aggregate of miles without relief.

Night. A cuckoo wheezes in the Waldorf-
Inglorious. The legions close their ranks
and, leaning against cohorts, sleep upright.
Circuses pile against fora. High in the night
above the bare blueprint of an empty court,
like a lost tennis ball, the moon regards its court,
a chess queen’s dream, spare, parqueted, formal and bright.
There’s no life without furniture.

VII
Only a corner cordoned off and laced
by dusty cobwebs may properly be called
right-angled; only after the musketry of applause
and bravos does the actor rise from the dead;
only when the fulcrum is solidly placed
can a person lift, by Archimedean laws,
the weight of this world. And only that body whose weight
is balanced at right angles to the floor
can manage to walk about and navigate.

Stifling. There’s a cockroach mob in the stadium
of the zinc washbasin, crowding around the old
corpse of a dried-up sponge. Turning its crown,
a bronze faucet, like Caesar’s laureled head,
deposes upon the living and the dead
a merciless column of water in which they drown.

The little bubble beads inside my glass
look like the holes in cheese.
No doubt that gravity holds sway,
just as upon a solid mass,
over such small transparencies as these.
And its accelerating waterfall
(thirty-two feet per sec per sec) refracts
as does a ray of light in human clay.

Only the stacked white china on the stove
could look so much like a squashed, collapsed pagoda.
Space lends itself just to repeatable things,
roses, for instance. If you see one alone,
you instantly see two. The bright corona,
the crimson petals abuzz, acrawl with wings
of dragonflies, of wasps and bees with stings.

Stifling. Even the shadow on the wall,
servile and weak as it is, still mimics the rise
of the hand that wipes the forehead’s sweat. The smell
of old body is even clearer now
than body’s outline. Thought loses its defined
edges; and the frazzled mind
goes soft in its soup-bone skull. No one is here
to set the proper focus of your eyes.

VIII
Preserve these words against a time of cold,
a day of fear: man survives like a fish,
stranded, beached, but intent
on adapting itself to some deep, cellular wish,
wriggling toward bushes, forming hinged leg-struts, then
to depart (leaving a track like the scrawl of a pen)
for the interior, the heart of the continent.

Full-breasted sphinxes there are, and lions winged
like fanged and mythic birds.
Angels in white, as well, and nymphs of the sea.
To one who shoulders the vast obscurity
of darkness and heavy heat (may one add, grief?)
they are more cherished than the concentric, ringed
zeros that ripple outward from dropped words.

Even space itself, where there’s nowhere to sit down,
declines, like a star in its ether, its cold sky.
Yet just because shoes exist and the foot is shod
some surface will always be there, some place to stand,
a portion of dry land.
And its brinks and beaches will be enchanted by
the soft song of the cod:

“Time is far greater than space. Space is a thing.
Whereas time is, in essence, the thought, the conscious dream
of a thing. And life itself is a variety
of time. The carp and bream
are its clots and distillates. As are even more stark
and elemental things, including the sea
wave and the firmament of the dry land.
Including death, that punctuation mark.

At times, in that chaos, that piling up of days,
the sound of a single word rings in the ear,
some brief, syllabic cry,
like ‘love’, perhaps, or possibly merely ‘hi!’
But before I can make it out, static or haze
trouble the scanning lines that undulate
and wave like the loosened ripples of your hair.”

IX
Man broods over his life like night above a lamp.
At certain moments a thought takes leave of one
of the brain’s hemisphere, and slips, as a bedsheet might,
from under the restless sleeper’s body clamp,
revealing who-knows-what-under-the-sun.
Unquestionably, night

is a bulky thing, but not so infinite
as to engross both lobes. By slow degrees
the Africa of the brain, its Europe, the Asian mass of it,
as well as other prominences in its crowded seas,
creaking on their axis, turn a wrinkeld cheek
toward the electric heron with its lightbulb of a beak.

Behold: Aladdin says “Sesame!” and presto! there’s a golden trove.
Caesar calls for his Brutus down the dark forum’s colonnades.
In the jade pavilion a nightingale serenades
the Mandarin on the delicate theme of love.
A young girl rocks a cradle in the lamp’s arena of light.
A naked Papuan leg keeps up a boogie-woogie beat.

Stifling. And so, cold knees tucked snug against the night,
it comes to you all at once, there in the bed,
that this is marriage. That beyond the customs sheds
across dozens of borders there turns upon its side
a body you now share nothing with, unless
it be the ocean’s bottom, hidden from sight,
and the experience of nakedness.

Nevertheless, you won’t get up together.
Because, while it may be light way over there,
the dark still governs in your hemisphere.
One solar source has never been enough
to serve two average bodies, not since the time
God glued the world together in its prime.
The light has never been enough.

X
I notice a sleeve’s hem, as my eyes fall,
and an elbow bending itself. Coordinates show
my location as paradise, that sovereign, blessed
place where all purpose and longing is set at rest.
This is a planet without vistas, with no
converging lines, with no prospects at all.

Touch the table corner, touch the sharp rib of the pen
with your fingertip: you can tell such things could hurt.
And yet the paradise of the inert
resides in pointedness;
whereas in the lives of men
it is fleeting, a misty, mutable excess
that will not come again.

I find myself, as it were, on a mountain peak.
Beyond me there is… Chronos and thin air.
Preserve these words. The paradise men seek
is a dead end, a worn-out, battered cape
bent into crooked shape,
a cone, a finial cap, a steel ship’s bow
from which the lookout never shouts, “Land ho!”

All you can tell for certain is the time.
That said, there’s nothing left but to police
the revolving hands. The eye drowns silently
in the clockface as in a broad, bottomless sea.
In paradise all clocks refuse to chime
for fear they might, in striking, disturb the peace.

Double all absences, multiply by two
whatever’s missing, and you’ll have some clue
to what it’s like here. A number, in any case,
is also a word and, as such, a device
or gesture that melts away without a trace,
like a small cube of ice.

XI
Great issues leave a trail of words behind,
free-form as clouds of treetops, rigids as dates
of the year. So, too, decked out in a paper hat,
the body viewing the ocean. It is selfless, flat
as a mirror as it stands in the darkness there.
Upon its face, just as within its mind,
nothing but spreading ripples anywhere.

Consisting of love, of dirty words, a blend
of ashes, the fear of death, the fragile case
of the bone, and the groin’s jeopardy, an erect
body at seaside is the foreskin of space,
letting semen through. His cheek tear-silver-flecked,
man juts forth into Time; man is his own end.

The eastern end of the Empire dives into night-
throat-high in darkness. The coil of the inner ear,
like a snail’s helix, faithfully repeats
spirals of words in which it seems to hear
a voice of its own, and this tends to incite
the vocal cords, but it doesn’t help you see.
In the realm of Time, no precipice creates
an echo’s formal, answering symmetry.

Stifling. Only when lying flat on your back
can you launch, with a sigh, your dry speech toward those mute,
infinite regions above. With a soft sigh.
But the thought of the land’s vastness, your own minute
size in comparison, swings you forth and back
from wall to wall, like a cradle’s rockabye.

Therefore, sleep well. Sweet dreams. Knit up that sleeve.
Sleep as those only do who have gone pee-pee.
Countries get snared in maps, never shake free
of their net of latitudes. Don’t ask who’s there
if you think the door is creaking. Never believe
the person who might reply and claim he’s there.

XII
The door is creaking. A cod stands at the sill.
He asks for a drink, naturally, for God’s sake.
You can’t refuse a traveler a nip.
You indicate to him which road to take,
a winding highway, and wish him a good trip.
He takes his leave, but his identical

twin has got a salesman’s foot in the door.
(The two fish are as duplicate as glasses.)
All night a school of them come visiting.
But people who make their homes along the shore
know how to sleep, have learned how to ignore
the measured tread of these approaching masses.

Sleep. The land beyond you is not round.
It is merely long, with various dip and mound,
its ups and downs. Far longer is the sea.
At times, like a wrinkled forehead, it displays
a rolling wave. And longer still than these
is the strand of matching beads of countless days;

and nights; and beyond these, the blindfold mist,
angels in paradise, demons down in hell.
And longer a hundredfold than all of this
are the thoughts of life, the solitary thought
of death. And ten times that, longer than all,
the queer, vertiginous thought of Nothingness.

But the eye can’t see that far. In fact, it must
close down its lid to catch a glimpse of things.
Only this way – in sleep – can the eye adjust
to proper vision. Whatever may be in store,
for good or ill, in the dreams that such sleep brings
depends on the sleeper. A cod stands at the door.

Velvet Underground - All Tomorrow's Parties

maandag 28 januari 2013

Woansdei yn it Friesch Dagblad: Der sille dagen komme

Woansdei wer in Skroeier yn it Friesch Dagblad, oer Gedichtedei, tongersdei, en de mislearring fan de demokratisearring fan de keunst, alteast, wat de poëzij oanbelanget. “Der sille dagen komme / dat de mem tsjin it bern seit / helje my in healpûn kofje / in pak sâlt / en in bondeltsje gedichten / in tin bondeltsje / want de moanne is hast om,” dichte Tiny Mulder alwer hiel lang lyn. Mar noch altyd ferkeapet it winkeltsje op 'e hoeke gjin dichtbondeltsjes:

"Is dat slim? Is it slim dat fan in Frysktalige dichtbondel trochstreeks tusken de 100 en de 200 eksimplaren ferkocht wurde? Efkes omrekkene: oer de hiele provinsje besjoen giet it wat keapers fan myn bondels oanbelanget om trije strjitten yn Winaam, it doarp mei 450 ynwenners dêr’t ik wei kom. Fansels soene jo hiele nijbouwiken oan de poëzij ha wolle. Nee, miskien is it ek wol goed sa. Poëzij fielt him it noflikst yn de lijte fan de massasmaak. Yn de frijsteat fan de sikers en de doarmers, de bûtensteanders en de healwizelingen."

zondag 27 januari 2013

Joseph Brodsky - I Sit By The Window

I said fate plays a game without a score,
and who needs fish if you've got caviar?
The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass
and turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.
I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.
When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.

I said the forest's only part of a tree.
Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?
Sick of the dust raised by the modern era,
the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.
I sit by the window. The dishes are done.
I was happy here. But I won't be again.

I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,
and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-
o Euclid thought the vanishing point became
wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.

I said that the leaf may destroy the bud;
what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;
that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain
nature spills the seeds of trees in vain.
I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees.
My heavy shadow 's my squat company.

My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked,
but at least no chorus can ever sing it back.
That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders
no one--no one's legs rest on my shoulders.
I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express,
the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

vrijdag 25 januari 2013

The White Stripes - Effect & Cause

Fjouwer kandidaten foar Gysbert Japicxpriis 2013

Earejuster hat Tresoar de groslist fan bondels dy’t yn ’e beneaming komme foar de Gysbert Japicxpriis 2013 op sirkwy.nl set. As dy list ien ding sjen lit, dan is it dat der noch altyd in macht oan poëzij yn it Frysk ferskynt: hast 50 bondels wurde neamd, publisearre yn 2009, 2010, 2011 en 2012.

En neist it bekroanen fan ien bondel bestiet fansels ek de mooglikheid dat it oeuvre fan in dichter bekroand wurdt.

It moat mar dalik sein: foarsizze wa’t de priis yn ûntfangst nimme sil is net ienfâldich. As nei de poëzij op himsels sjoen wurdt, soe ik persoanlik de nammen neame fan Eppie Dam en Eeltsje Hettinga. Mar miskien is it noch net ien opfallen: sûnt 1986 (Tiny Mulder) hat gjin frou de priis mear krigen. Dat betsjut dat Albertina Soepboer en Baukje Wytsma – fan wa’t benammen de earste har wurk meunsterje kin tsjin dat fan Hettinga en Dam – likegoed kâns hawwe.

Wytsma har poëzij is miskien minder ferrassend, mar har konsistinte oeuvre omfiemet wilens al njoggen bondels. De gearstalling fan de sjuery dit jier – Jetske Bilker, Goffe Jensma en Jantsje Post – liket net dalik yn it neidiel fan Soepboer en Wytsma.

Dam, Hettinga, Soepboer en Wytsma dus. Mei as ‘outsider’ Jacobus Smink, dy’t mei Sondelfal in prachtige bondel ôflevere. Sjoch dêr myn spekulaasjes. Foar wat se wurdich binne.

maandag 21 januari 2013

Nina Simone - Go To Hell

Woansdei yn it Friesch Dagblad: Fryske Akademy by UCF is in kâns

Woansdei yn it Friesch Dagblad wer in Skroeier, diskear oer de mooglike oergong fan de Fryske Akademy fan de KNAW nei de UCF yn Ljouwert:

"Mar giet it hjir om in bedriging, of krekt om in kâns? Oansluting fan de FA by de nije, yn 2011 oprjochte University Campus Fryslân (UCF) yn Ljouwert is miskien wol in folle bettere opsje as in ûnwis bestean as ûnderknuppel fan in nasjonaal ferbân. Mei de komst fan de FA nei de UCF sil de UCF faaks better útgroeie kinne ta in echte universiteit. In Fryske universiteit, dy’t wy al sa lang (sûnt 1811) misse moatte."

Jaep Meems oer Tim

Jaep Meems, grut keunstleafhawwer út Twizelerheide, oer pianist Robert Poortinga en Tim. Foar de site fan de Stichting Keunstkrite Twizel waard er (yn novimber al) ynterviewd:

Fraach: "Wie moeten we in de gaten houden op dat terrein volgens jou? Wie gaat er 'een grote' worden?"

Meems: "Robert Poortinga! Een jonge jongen uit Damwâld, pianist. Kwam bij mij via de Wâldsang. Geweldig talent! Speelt nu in New York waar hij zijn opleiding vervolgt. Heb ik via mijn contacten voor hem tot stand kunnen brengen. Dat bedoel ik dus met kruiwagens. Hij geeft in januari hier een huiskamerconcert. Die moet je zeker in de gaten houden!

Nog zo eentje: Tim de Vries, zoon van journalist Abe de Vries van het Friesch Dagblad. Kwam hier met zijn evenzeer begaafde broertje. Tim heeft het in zich om een groot violist te worden. Zoals die jongen speelt met zijn instrument! Het is een wonderkind. Speelt binnenkort samen met Simone Lamsma. Won het Prinses Christina Junior Concours dit jaar.

Ik dacht 'dat moet bij elkaar' en dus heb ik Robert en Tim elkaar hier laten ontmoeten. Fantastisch was dat!"

Lês it hiele ynterview hjir: http://www.keunstkrite.nl/jaep-meems-leven-in-verbondenheid/

zondag 20 januari 2013

It draaiboek

Fol goede moed, want noch gjin weet
fan gnjirdzjende kjeld, fan skonken
dêr’t de froast, alhiel op skik
en goed op gleed, yn opkrûpt
troch it moarch djip yn ’e bonken
yn ’e hoop dat ik derûnder strûp;

sa streekje ’k mei breed berik -
ik set yn Ljouwert fleurich út ein.
Hinneglydjzend oer de glêde Swette
koers ik - dit is lok! - op Snits oan,
regelmjittich ridend as in diseltrein,
in swart stipke yn it wiidwite lân.

Myn skaad skekt muoiteleas mei.
Laitsjend jou ik har, djip sittend,
folle hite, kâld-beripe willetuten
op twa lippen en twa brilleglêzen.
Fan de finish doe neat noch wittend,
it draaiboek noait net útlêzen.

It donoriis slacht oan fan leafde
foarearst, en de tocht fan tochten
is in op wjokken gean nei Drylts.
Mar, wylst ik tûk de skuorren mij
en tige sierlik rûnje de bochten,
fljocht sy synienen my foarby

om nei Sleat fier út sicht te reitsjen.
It folk op ’e wâl ek ûnneispeurlik
mei trommel en toeter fertrokken,
stiet boppe Starum de sinne iis-
blommeranend en bûtengebeurlik
fan 't sintrum en fan 'e wiis;

eaget de iensume reedrider nei,
dy’t stûf oer klúnplakken klost,
wer de oanheljende wyn trotseart,
no sûnder ridersmaat en stalke.
Yn Hylpen mis ik de stimpelpost,
yn Warkum de pûrelarymolke.

Yn ’e fierte lizze de feepleatsen.
De boeren melke op sinnesellen.
Wynmûnen prikke steil de wierheid
oan in loft no leech en griis as laai:
Boalsert driuwt op molkefellen,
Harns wurdt yn jiskewolken wei.

Ier falt de jûn oer ’t Fryske lân,
foar 't gefoel is 't al djip ûnder nul.
Tsien kear knoffelje en de knibbels
lizze my oan bliedens ta iepen.
Is dizze tocht gjin grutte flauwekul?
Lit my gewurde, lit my sliepe,

wês my genedich, master Froast,
jou my noch fóar Frjentsjer in stee
yn de stive reiden fan de Ried
of oars mar ûnder Getswerdersyl.
Ik, in klosjaar op stompe redens,
in wurge toerrider sûnder styl.

Dan wurdt it deastil om my hinne.
Oer Doanjumerfeart en Blikfeart
rinne grif al de rjochte streken
fan har, dy’t my fier foarút is
mar ik, in slûgen en neat byleard,
wit net mear wat skyn is en wat wis.

Spoeken helje my by Dokkum yn,
dwaalljochten ljochtsje my by!
Skimen raze nei my, skaden roppe!
Achter de nacht stiet in húske.
Dêr, oan 'e ein, de riderij foarby,
wachtet my it Alvestêdetochtkrúske.

*

(bywurke 20 jannewaris 2013)

Trinus Riemersma - Fers 54, oer Douwe Kiestra en de frou

Ladytron - Destroy Everything You Touch

Woven Hand - Glistening Black

donderdag 17 januari 2013

Sneon yn it Friesch Dagblad: Besprek fan Troch eigen lânskip fan Willem Abma

Sneon yn it Friesch Dagblad einlings wer in poëzijbesprek, diskear fan Willem Abma syn prachtich foarmjûne blomlêzing Troch eigen lânskip, ferline jier ferskynd bij Wijdemeer yn Ljouwert:

"It hear fan dit oeuvre oereagjend, falt nochris op hoe’t by Abma – in ‘dichter fan de tocht nei binnen’, sa typearret Breuker him – rûchwei de earste tritich jier fan syn dichtsjen de ynhâld de foarm dominearre hat. It typyske Abma-gedicht, as ik dat sa neame mei, is yn dy perioade in meast koarte en nei de taal frij noftere, bytiden ek wat swiersettige bespegeling oer it sels, it ik en it plak dêrfan yn de rin fan de dingen. Opskreaun sûnder al tefolle stilistyske fersiersels, faak wol mei einrym mar meast koartôf yn de formulearring. Ek de muzikaliteit fan de taal, it boartsjen mei toansoarten, hat net syn grutste belangstelling hân. As dichter hat Abma himsels earder frijtocht as frijsongen."

woensdag 16 januari 2013

Ravensulver

Presintaasje In hazze is in lokkich bern en Ravensulver, Gedichtedei, 31 jannewaris, Tresoar

útnoeging / uitnodiging

Utjouwerij HotSum noeget jo mei út namme fan Edwin de Groot, Abe de Vries, de Contrabas en Tresoar fan herten út foar de presintaasje fan twa twatalige dichtbondels op Gedichtedei yn Tresoar, Ljouwert. Mei û.m.:
- Foardracht;
- Twa winners fan foardrachtskriich FERSTIVAL;
- Anne Tjerk Popkema oer literêr oersetten;
- Muzyk fan Herman Peenstra;
- Penneldiskusje oer oersetten û.l.f. Teake Oppewal
31 Jannewaris, Tresoar, 16.00 oere.
Uitgeverij HotSum nodigt u mede uit naam van Edwin de Groot, Abe de Vries, de Contrabas en Tresoar van harte uit voor de presentatie van twee tweetalige dichtbundels op Gedichtendag in Tresoar, Leeuwarden. Met o.m.:
- Voordracht;
- Twee winnaars van voordrachtwedstrijd FERSTIVAL;
- Anne Tjerk Popkema over literair vertalen;
- Muziek van Herman Peenstra;
- Paneldiscussie over vertalen o.l.v. Teake Oppewal.
31 Januari, Tresoar, 16.00 uur.

In hazze is in lokkich bern / Een haas is een gelukkig kind is Edwin de Groot's tredde dichtbondel en syn earste twatalige. Tema's as fergonkelikheid, de betreklikens fan ús bestean en it bestean fan de dichter foarmje wol de reade tried. Oan 'e ein binne we inkeld in stofke yn it universum. Dat kin tryst oerkomme mar ek befrijend wêze.
Een haas is een gelukkig kind / In hazze is in lokkich bern is de derde dichtbundel van Edwin de Groot en zijn eerste tweetalige. Thema’s als vergankelijkheid, de betrekkelijkheid van ons bestaan en het bestaan van de dichter vormen wel de rode draad. Aan het einde zijn we maar een stofje in het universum. Dat kan triest overkomen, maar ook bevrijdend zijn.

Abe de Vries presintearret syn sechsde bondel, Ravensulver / Ravenzilver. Leafde, heit, lân en taal, bytiden liket it as is in grut part fan jins wrâld oan it ferdwinen, weisinkend yn de tiid, it oantinken. Allinnich op it eilân fan de poëzij kin wat der fan oer is behâlden bliuwe. Sân searjes fan trije fersen litte har lêze as in opstannich postskriptum by de yllúzje fan duorsumens.
Abe de Vries presenteert zijn zesde dichtbundel, Ravenzilver / Ravensulver. Liefde, vader, land en taal, soms lijkt het alsof een groot deel van je wereld aan het verdwijnen is, verzinkt in de tijd, de herinnering. Alleen op het eiland van de poëzie kan een restant behouden blijven. Zeven series van drie gedichten laten zich lezen als een opstandig postscriptum bij de illusie van duurzaamheid.

*
Edwin de Groot (It Hearrenfean, 1963) debutearre yn 2005 mei it fers ‘Slachfjild’. Nei ferskate publikaasjes yn de tydskriften De Moanne, Farsk, Hjir, ensafh en op de Contrabas kaam yn 2008 syn debútbondel Ik skip út. Yn 2010 ferskynde Tongfal. Edwin de Groot krige yn 2007 in Rely Jorritsmapriis foar syn fers ‘Yn it omgean’.
Edwin de Groot (Heerenveen, 1963) debuteerde in 2005 met het gedicht ‘Slachfjild’. Na verschillende publicaties in de tijdschriften De Moanne, Farsk, Hjir, ensafh en op de Contrabas kwam in 2008 zijn debuutbundel Ik skip uit. In 2010 verscheen Tongfal. Edwin de Groot kreeg in 2007 een Rely Jorritsmaprijs voor zijn gedicht ‘Yn it omgean’.

Abe de Vries (Winaam, 1965) publisearre De weromkommer yn it ûnlân (2002), In waarm wek altyd (2004), Under fearne goaden (2006), Fangst fan ‘e demoandolfyn (2008) en Sprankeskyn (2010). Yn 2002 krige er foar syn syklus ‘Fersen fan ferjitten’ de Rely Jorritsmapriis; yn 2005 foar syn twadde bondel de Gysbert Japicxpriis. Syn esseebondel Identiteit & kowesturten (2008) waard yn 2012 nominearre foar de Fedde Schurerpriis.
Abe de Vries (Wijnaldum, 1965) publiceerde De weromkommer yn it ûnlân (2002), In waarm wek altyd (2004), Under fearne goaden (2006), Fangst fan ‘e demoandolfyn (2008) en Sprankeskyn (2010). In 2002 kreeg hij voor zijn cyclus ‘Fersen fan ferjitten’ de Rely Jorritsmaprijs; in 2005 voor zijn tweede bundel de Gysbert Japicxprijs. Zijn essaybundel Identiteit & kowesturten (2008) werd in 2012 genomineerd voor de Fedde Schurerprijs.

maandag 14 januari 2013

Woansdei yn it Friesch Dagblad: De skriuwer as slútpost

Woansdei wer in Skroeier yn it Friesch Dagblad. Wêrom is de skriuwer eins altyd de slútpost yn it Frysk boekebedriuw? En wannear sil dêr ris wat feroaring yn komme?

"Is de Fryske literatuer, of yn bredere sin it Fryske boekebedriuw, yn dat ljocht ek net in soarte fan Frânske Revolúsje dy’t syn kroast opfret? Je soene it hast tinke, as je sjogge nei de ferdieling fan it beskikbere jild yn it sirkwy fan skriuwers, setters, foarmjouwers, útjouwers en boekhannels. Allegear fertsjinje se jild, hawwe omset, of strike subsydzje op. Allegear hawwe se yn alle gefallen in ekonomyske bân mei de Revolúsje.

Op de skriuwers nei, yn fierwei de measte gefallen. De skriuwers, de wiere revolúsjonêren, de ‘bern fan de literatuer’, binne mar al te faak de slútpost fan it systeem. As it oan harren ta is, dat wol sizze as de werklike kultuerdragers wat weromfreegje foar harren ynspanningen, dan is it jild op."