This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders: https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/via-via-contact-met-pretbescherming
Via via contact with pleasure protection
Night of Poetry
Tonight is the Night of Poetry
which thrives on stage,
in Utrecht, Tivoli Vredenburg.
But yesterday I stood by a water basin
in the forest park in Lokeren.
With the back of my hand, I stroked
the water’s surface.
It seemed as if I were writing something
in elegant letters that,
as soon as it was written, disappeared again.
And fish approached,
first small, darting, colorful,
but gradually larger ones too, somewhat slower,
chasing the smaller ones away.
And from the depths, motionless almost
and eerily still like corpses
floating to the surface,
the largest fish rose
and vanished back into those same depths
when it became clear I had nothing to offer them.
Koenraad Goudeseune (1965 – 2020)
We have now arrived at page 262 of the Piranha. Be critical, and you will never be invited anywhere again. That was more or less the core message that floated around in my generation. Koenraad had to die without ever having stood on a major poetry festival stage, and the same fate is reserved for me. And of course, that carries symbolic weight. Look, this is what our system does to critical people: it silences them by pretending they do not exist.
It is also a symptom of a degenerative movement when you consider the bigger picture. We observe a trajectory: from Chekhov to Gombrowicz to Bolaño. Chekhov could still smile serenely at “the butterflies” because they were not truly in his way. He wrote from a world in which literature still held some authority, where writer and butterfly existed in separate realms. With Gombrowicz, this was already different: the butterflies had become innumerable, and he arrived “fifty years too late” in the literary discourse—resulting in a body of work steeped in resentment and mockery. Bolaño, in the ultimate irony, was only truly published after his death. He was devoured by the butterflies before he could properly take flight.
And so we slide further in time, into the present. In today’s climate, the writer is no longer postponed—he is ignored. Not out of anger, but out of indifference. No more Gombrowicz resisting, no Bolaño triumphing posthumously, but a silent vanishing act in real time. The Piranha has elevated silence into an art form.
*
Meanwhile, four of my remarkable music pieces, created in collaboration with the monks of the Monastery of the Black Mountains, are now online. Here is the track ‘Birth,’ which will likely open the album:
*
On Neerlandistiek.nl, Krudzlo—yes, how should I put this—is starting to… spiral?
Eh, telling stories. Drunk, stoned, snorting, knees meeting in the lower body’s center, scissor motion, eh, panting like a bull, then a shower. I love you eh, my thoughts I cannot finish eh, eh help me. My book is about Europe. The bull and me. No one concludes anything except with eh. Repetition gets you far. Thought about it a lot, many ehs and examples from literature. I am a butterfly on the back of the bull and eh, the pleasure: reality remains outside everyone’s fun. My face is more than just a bull’s head.
Help me. It’s a cry for help. Krudzlo believes he is ‘the butterfly on the back of the bull.’ That ‘bull’ is, of course, information management. What the butterfly is, well, for that, you would have to ask the Russians. Cunt and tits drawn with clear lines. But Robert, how can I help you? I have already written two letters to you, more or less, but you don’t respond and have instead suddenly begun publishing frantic little drawings.
‘Reality remains outside everyone’s fun,’ you write. What I read in that is the idea that you think you are engaged in something we might call pleasure protection. Have I formulated that correctly? How are the pleasure doughnuts faring on the Costa today? Any movement on Bolaño’s filthy mountain? You will have to answer at some point, Robert.
*
*
For now, I am immersing myself in Turkish and Italian poetry. Through Refik Durbaş, I found this piece about Ahmet Erhan, whom I will now naturally investigate, but look at how beautifully a poet can write about a fellow poet:
A WORLD MIGRANT WAS HE…
In The Illustrated History of the Ahmets, he introduced himself as follows:
“8.02.1958. Son of Ahmet İzzet, born of Emine. / Divorced. Islam. İçel. Mersin. Mesudiye and a heap / of numbers. Reason for issuance: loss. Keçiören. Ankara. In the name of the civil registrar. / A child of the Mediterranean who learned to swim over forty-year sessions, a centipede splitting every strand. / Do not forget to name his son ‘Deniz.’ / As if at the slightest ripple in a swaying boat / his roar would turn seagulls into refugees.”
His real name was Ahmet Bozkurt, but since publishing his first poem in 1976, he became known as Ahmet Erhan.
“In the scorching heat of three matches a day, he ran at Adana Demirspor, alongside Fatih Terim, chasing a battered leather ball.”
When Fatih transferred to Galatasaray, he left behind years that tasted bitter like a drained glass of milk…
Not in football, but in horse racing, he tempered his excitement. That is why, in his poetry, words competed between sensitivity and sentiment.
Did we first meet during the early ‘80s New Türkü Poetry Contest, organized by Yaşar Miraç for young poets?
Or later, at the ever-abundant table of our mutual friend, the beloved Işık Kansu, when I was in Ankara for the Ceyhun Atuf Kansu Poetry Prize?
How could I ever forget those long Ankara nights—though they were rare—nights when we added a few more bottles to the “five thousand crates of beer, three thousand crates of rakı, twenty-five hundred crates of wine, cognac, and vodka”?
With his early poems, he flooded the twilight of his country with brilliance, and that torch never extinguished in his words.
A QUESTION MARK
A scent of thyme swirls in the morning twilight.
A fish glides through the sea, a star fades in the sky.
And morning unfolds like a national anthem.
The trails of snails stretch longer in the soil,
vanishing between the grass.
“I couldn’t even be a snail,” says the poet.
Now I remain in this world as a question mark.
I touch the dew resting on the leaves.
Stretched out in the shade of an orange tree,
listening to the singing of cicadas,
I wrote this poem half-asleep.
The Mediterranean bubbles nearby like a teapot.
Soon I will rise and wash my face,
then perhaps read a book or water the flowers.
Ahmet ERHAN – Translation by Martinus Benders
*
Yours sincerely,
Martinus Benders