Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

This week the Iranian government hung one of my fellow countrymen because of unclear reasons. I decided to write a poem about it when i saw this picture, so here it is. This work is free of copyright so you can reproduce it wherever you want.

Let’s talk about the guy in the safari shirt.

This woman named Zahra was hanged
because she drank alcohol, or protested the government, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter to them and it doesn’t matter to us.
Forget about Zahra. Focus on the chameleon in her hand,

can you see how it took the color of the street, can you see
the shopping bags, the guy in the safari shirt?

Let’s talk about the guy in the safari shirt.
He cannot be anything else

than a guy with a belly
in a too small safari shirt
even if he tries very hard

there will always be
a camera like this one
exposing him, in a way

he’s hanging just like Zahra was, it’s just that
he never drank alcohol, as far as we know,
and never protested anything either

and if it wasn’t for a stupid poet like me
no one would have ever noticed his demise

a thought that brings him great comfort
on a cold, distant evening in a room close
to where you are sitting now.

Martijn 29-01-2011

The Craft

You have found a stone.
But it is not your stone.
So you keep polishing and polishing.
The craft, you say, is to create a flawless stone
one indistinguishably remarkable.

But it’s not your craft, is it?
It is the found beast of an old tradition.
True, there are worse things in this world
than a couple of polished stones.

One day you will stretch out your hand
and offer us your perfect stone.
It will glow, in the middle of your palm
like a star only dreamed of by puppets.

You will stand in front of the mob,
expect nothing less than a crucifixion
or, at least, to meet the original stone
receiving its autograph on your corpse.

But no one moves. The crowds stare
only reminds you of the desert of birth.
You, who owns an invisible star, are
now at mercy of a nursing wasteland.

Square one, home of the creator.
But it’s not your square, is it?

It’s been around. In all its hidden glory.
In all its hidden glory. It’s been around.

Martijn 18-01-2011

What originally motivated you to begin writing poetry?

Girls. I thought it was a great way of impressing girls. Of course
later I found out that having an expensive mobile phone works much
better. The girl I wrote my first poem to just looked at me like I was
crazy. So I got the natural idea that I was probably not good enough
at it yet and started with the vain idea that i could improve these
skills. Of course later on I realized that having a crisp hundred
dollar bill sticking out of your breast pocket is much more effective
if you want to get interactive.

Are all of your poems kind of constructed around a main theme?

No. In fact if you investigate this idea closely you will see that
‘themes’ actually do not exist in the entire corpus of poetry. This is
because of the nature of poetry, which primarily is a tool that tries
to name the unnameable. You could, for example, claim lots of poems
have ‘death’ as a theme. But do they really? The theme itself is often
just a metaphor for something else. And death is an abstract concept,
in this case operating in the abstract environment of a poem. So what
exactly does it mean to call ‘death’ a theme? Nothing much on closer
investigation. A poet could really be talking about anything
imaginable and make it look like a poem about death. Don’t be fooled.
Poets are tricksters.

How do you feel poetry is beneficial to the world of literature, and
the world itself?

The world of literature kind of stinks. It’s full of fools who have
invested a lot of time in ‘cultural capital’ and are very hungry to
get returns on those investments in the form of recognition. Frankly,
only a complete moron would waste his precious time on this planet
with such insane people. In my opinion poetry wants to have little to
do with those people. The stuff they praise always seems pretty random
to me. They praise good stuff and they praise bad stuff, all is the
same to them. If you wanna write poems just keep out of the world
of literature that’s what I say.

As to ‘what beneficial effect does poetry have on the world’ I am not
at liberty to answer that question since this is one of our trade
secrets.

When you pull together a piece of poetry, is it all at once, or do you
begin a piece and return to it later?

In my opinion the most effective way of writing poetry is to get up at
0600 in the morning every day and write, write the poem until the
draft is finished. I have heard this from several great poets – early
in the morning the mind is the cleanest and its most easy to produce
poetry without the mind interfering with itself. Just do that every
day for a few years, then you have like a few hundred drafts. Then
reserve a month or two to rewrite about 50 or 60 good poems from those
hundreds of drafts. And there you go.

Do you have any big inspirations for your poetry?

How exactly does one measure the size of inspirations? How am i
supposed to know if an inspiration is big or not? Sometimes you feel
something, a little tickle in the back of your head. Sometimes you
feel an incredible urge. Is the last ‘bigger’ than the first? Better?
Hell if I know. Big inspirations, little inspirations, I do them all,
dude. I’m an omni-inspirationalist. In my opinion the whole world is
fabricated by inspirations. But now I am getting dangerously close to
those trade secrets again.

Thanks a ton once again, I know you’re likely very busy and It’s very
much appreciated.

Welcome, Lee. I wish you the best of luck with your project. Let me
close this interview with one of my favourite poems from Milosz, which
concerns some of the topics we touched in this interview:

A Confession (1985)

My God, I loved strawberry jam.
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognise greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Czeslaw Milosz

Hi folks,

For a while you heard nothing from me because I was busy with various projects. As I have already told you I am working on a kind of tetralogy, and already working on those projects they keep changing under my eyes – it is far from crystal clear how the tetralogy will look like, what exactly it will consist of and whether it will even be a tetralogy as such.

Tetralogy

As it looks now, the series include:

1. A novel that will be called “Bilderberg”.
2. A collection of poems with a yet unknown title.
3. A philosophy book named “Holokapital’.
4. A CD with electrorap in Dutch
5. A CD with arrangements of Rachmaninov.

I think I currently about 25% of project completion is done – but I would not dare predict how long it takes for the entire project is completed. As always for me I definitely do not want to put out mediocre products, which in this case a difficult requirement, because to excel in four different genres is by no means easy. However, I am convinced that I will succeed to create a very special package from this tetralogy. Currently, I put the emphasis on the novel, since the poems already quite far advanced and I have made more than 400 songs in one year, enough material to distil things out later.

Turing national poetry contest

I also have two or three poems in the top 100 of the Turing national poetry contest. The exact number is unclear because there is a poem in the top 100 songs of the same title as a poem that I have sent, but with a different registration number. It’s possible that someone sent a poem with the same title, or there is an error in the numeration. In the former case I’m at least represented with two poems in the top 100.

I have sent the organization when it became known the following mail:

Dear Maria Böggemann

Martijn Benders.

And a few days later in the mail, after consultation with my standin:

Marieke, this is Bart, that’s my standin when I do not finish high enough.
Bart says he he’s disabled on the 26th. Could you please reschedule the event.
That’d be great, thanks.

I received a response only today. It was apparently impossible to reschedule the event. Bit weird of course. So much went wrong already in this contest so far. I have sent them the following email:

Dear Marieke Böggemann,

Martijn Benders

Fund of Criticism

Positive news on the Fund of Criticism: that’s going to go ahead. I have already designed a logo for a website and within about a month the Fun will be operational.

The Fund of Criticism

Tashi Dhondup is a Tibetan poet and musician that has been sentenced to 10 years of hard labour by the Chinese government. His crime? Writing songs. Tashi wrote popular songs against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. In protofascist states such is considered a crime.

He is by no means the only tibetan writer or artist that has got arrested recently. Reports indicate that the last three months the chinese government has arrested more than 50 writers, poets and musicians. People who were arrested in the middle of the night and taken away, because they wrote poems, songs or made artworks the autorities disapprove of.

China has become the dark underbelly of our capitalist system. They produce almost anything we use in the western world. That makes us responsible for its policies, in a sense, because we have at many levels been economically and politically merged with their system. Slavoj Zizek once said that China proves Capitalism can very well function without democracy and that this is the biggest danger that lies ahead of us. He may very well be right: except that I believe this is already kind of ‘old news’, in the sense that most democracies in the west have become like show trials. The ‘double standards’ people complain about are actually preconditions without which the system wouldnt work.

What can we do to free Tashi Dhondup? I am afraid not a whole lot. We could send mails to the Chinese Embassy or just spread this story around. I have great symphaty for the Tibetan people, who have been the most spirited and warm people I have ever met in my travels. So yes, I am amongst those that keeps saying ‘Free Tibet Now’.

Join Free Tibet

Interactive is interactive

I dreamt
that I could get a nice new car
or no a weird new car
or no a new unknown car
for free, or better said
500 bucks a month
and just a half year
said the salesman
in my dream.

And what happens
after that half year
with the new unknown car
I asked him. ‘After a half
year you pay normally’
he said and I asked
what happens if you can’t
‘you can sell it and
we simply call it even’
the salesman who had
just a narrative function
in my dream said.

In my dream
I saw advertisements of others
that sold the same new unknown car
for a quite normal price.

And I thought: yes. That’s a good action.
That’s a very good new unknown action.

In the future we will
live our daily life in a world
that is completely free
of advertisements.

Martijn Benders, 20-06-2010