This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders: https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/waarom-klinkt-ik-hou-van-jou
Why Does ‘Ik Hou van Jou’ Sound So Awkward?
Honestly, I have never read a poem by Paul van Ostaijen that even mildly appealed to me. It is a complete mystery why people worship this man as some kind of saint.
The striking thing is that on a site like gedichten.nl, where random amateurs can rate poems with stars, Van Ostaijen is immensely popular, whereas experimental poetry usually only garners a single star.
Now I feel how a dying sunlight
increases the real pain of this grieving tide;
weary or not – who can tell? – carrying, like a stiff old woman,
autumn’s joyless days, without warmth, without cold.
Clumsier than this poem Herfst is hardly possible. It reads as if an ailing municipal secretary, bedridden with a mild flu, is reflecting on his will and decides to make one last poetic attempt. Or take Koorts, a poem in which the poet, slick with sweat, stands before a mirror in what is surely a satin nightgown, wondering whether to take another sip of cognac or—dare he—experiment:
“In my head a foolish miller has climbed,
who, one by one and slowly, conscious of his deed,
empties his sacks of grain. A fine, soft glow
of dull dust swirls in the sun; that brings infinite pain.”
Infinite pain to the ears, without a doubt. A climbing miller, a conscious deed – and then that final line! As if the poetic genius is poking at the mist with a broomstick, hoping that the result will somehow resemble poetry. But it gets worse.
When Van Ostaijen truly loses himself and juggles language as if tormented by some opium dream, we are treated to gems like this from Boem Paukeslag:
“Oh not yet up
step to go
outside it is
still night”
The relentless hammering of words sounds like the banging of a drunk uncle who has passed out at a family gathering and dreams he is giving the avant-garde a nudge. Boem Paukeslag is his most famous poem, celebrated as the first example of concrete poetry in these lands. Or take the magnum opus of his nursery rhyme sound-fetishism:
“woof woof war
I
saw the spinach steaming on the plates
and the people were around the plates
like winter around the fire.”
This is not experimentation. This is shredding a sonnet with a rusty tin cutter and hoping the scattered letters form a meaningful image. Van Ostaijen was the first to realize that you could sprinkle letters across the page the way a toddler scatters sugar cubes.
Normally, poets become more experimental as they age. But not Van Ostaijen—he moved in the opposite direction. A Mondrian who suddenly started painting dull landscapes—apparently, in poetry, such a thing is possible:
Golgotha
If truth resides
where my brother showed it to me,
the late Pieter-Floris, –
(he was a theology student
at a Roman Catholic seminary) –
If it was the Son of God who walked to Golgotha
and his divine sorrow
was humankind’s liberation,
then the Flemish people are God’s chosen nation,
because they, like the divine fruit born of David’s house,
walked their steep Golgotha, crucified,
and housed in death.
But God was in his son the divinity
of resurrection;
so too will God be in our struggle
for liberation.
The man locked himself into the dreary rhetoric of a Vatican year report toward the end of his life. The “experimenter” became a believer, the anarchist a pathetic apostle of an imaginary Flemish martyr culture.
Is it any coincidence that Van Ostaijen ended up in a sanatorium shortly after? Of course not. This poem is the sanatorium. It is the final convulsion of a poet who no longer knew how to shape his madness and instead surrendered to the greatest madness of them all: the conviction that the Flemish people are the chosen ones, Flemings as the new Christ.
*
On to another Fleming—Bart Moeyaert
Bart Moeyaert is a Jan Arends who spent his life listening to Candlelight rather than Kafka, all because modern audiences believe poetry should be a budget-friendly version of Tinder. Hedonism triumphed, the beautiful people won the war—one collection of love poems after the other is published, because the time when a love poem was the hardest thing a poet could write is long gone.
Confession
I like you.
No. I don’t like you.
I must have you. That’s what I mean.
I love you.
No. I don’t.
I am loving you. I feel it.
I go with you.
No. I don’t.
I stand by you. I promise.
So far, it works. You can hear a faint echo of 500 Miles by The Proclaimers in the structure:
But then disaster strikes. Nothing sounds more awkward than ‘I love you’.
I am crazy about you.
Hold on tight.
I. Love. You.I believe.
Moeyaert is still poet enough to recognize the awkwardness. But everything in his work ultimately serves the Tinder aesthetic. Project just enough relatable sweetness onto the other to increase the odds of a kiss. Manipulate the flickering screen with the right vibe, perfect the I’m sensitive but not too complicated image.
And there you stand, with your robotic I LOVE YOU. A declaration so prefab, so clinical in its fragmented structure, you can almost hear the mechanical voice crack. Why does I love you sound so painfully stiff? Because it allows no movement, no doubt, no breathing space. It is a synthetic emotion, pre-packaged and vacuum-sealed.
It immediately carries a sense of possession. Hold on tight! Why? Is love about to dissipate? What kind of panic response is this? Love must be clung to, because there is no real movement, no organic attraction—just a forced need for validation. This is love as formatted data: tightly outlined, pre-cut into digestible segments for people who believe in nothing and thus crave constant reassurance.
And so Moeyaert’s poetry becomes the literary equivalent of a lava lamp: pleasant to look at, even calming, but devoid of substance, devoid of real heat. An endlessly undulating mass of predictable emotions, perfect for self-reflection—until you realize the mirror image says nothing back.
Martinus Benders, 16-02-2025
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