In recent years, the effect of the internet on Dutch poetry has been tremendous. I believe this neither to be primarily a question of the invention of new genres (such as interactive poetry or Flash-animated poetry), nor just a question of different forms of distribution of poetry and poetical discourse and the different organization of community, through the growth of the blogosphere, as such. Both of these developments are of course vital and interesting. But from my own perspective, the most fundamental aspect of the internet’s influence on my own reading and writing practice (and that of many younger poets I know) is how it has opened up Dutch poetic practice to outside influences, most notably American ones. And this raises fundamental questions about what it means to be writing poetry in Dutch in a globalized world.
The internet has seen a great expansion of the possibilities for world-wide distribution of poetry from the American small presses. It is now very easy to order a book published by some small press through Amazon.com, Small Press Distribution in California, or from the publishing company itself. At the same time, the poetical debate surrounding small press publications has become readily accessible from Amsterdam because of the great liveliness of the American poetical blogosphere. Together, these two developments have made experimental poetry of America much more accessible, and have changed my perspective on American poetry.
Back in the 90s, one might have heard of the existence of some poet doing interesting work, but unless he or she were published by a major trade press, it would be very tricky to get bookshops to import their work, or even to find out what was available at all. Getting to know it would typically take at least visiting their country. For example, I had heard of Jackson Mac Low and the Language Poets primarily through references to them in the work of composers like John Cage or Brian Ferneyhough, whose works and writings I was familiar with (the field of contemporary music being by its nature more international than that of literature); but I had no way of knowing what their work was actually like. If it was actually known to a few poets in Holland and Flanders, this could only be because they had come across those books in fringe bookshops in the USA in person.
We now live at the end of the Oughts, and the picture has changed dramatically. A new generation of Dutch poets, which includes Arnoud van Adrichem, the late Jeroen Mettes, and myself, have managed to become very familiar with the Language Poetry tradition. I have been able to track down the important works of Jackson Mac Low which allowed me to start a Jackson Mac Low Band based in Amsterdam, dedicated to the performance of his text compositions and of related work. Finally, extremely recent literary phenomena from America such as Flarf and Conceptual Writing have left their mark on the Dutch scene, particularly by the emergence of a Dutch counterpart to the Flarf collective.
As has always been the case, the liveliness of foreign literary developments is an important source for the Dutch situation as well. But those literatures have now become available in much greater quantities, and it has become easier to sidestep the slow and heavily institutionalized process of canonization. Consequently, in the Low Countries we now have access to work that would not have surfaced at all in the older economy. If it took half a century before Vestdijk introduced Dickinson to Dutch readers, Flarf could make its mark on the Dutch situation within about five years. What gets noticed and picked up in The Netherlands and in Flanders has less and less to do with the institutional structures of major publishing and academic canonization, and more and more with the vitality of poetical discussion, which, in the States, generally is most vibrant in the ‘Post-Avant’ general family of poetic directions.
And those American discussions of poetics are influencing discussions in Dutch. Posts on Silliman’s Blog get discussed by Dutch readers, and, again, Flarf presents a strong case in point, with large-scale polemics being waged on Dutch weblogs around topics that originate in American blog discussions. De Contrabas‘ Ton van ’t Hof, for example, very regularly posts links to entries on poetics on American websites.
For myself, then, foreign poetry has become a more important factor than original Dutch poetry. About half the poetry I have bought over the past five years is in English; about a quarter is in Dutch; the rest is mostly in German, French, or Spanish. This has caused a veritable reversal in my relation to my own language: if, normally, one would read foreign poetry and evaluate it with respect to its relation to domestic poetic developments, today I increasingly find myself ‘testing’ Dutch language poetry against what I know from foreign poetries.
There is a subtle difference between the poetic situation in one’s language being influenced by outside influences, and the continuation of some debate that comes from an outside context within one’s own language. The balance seems to shift now more towards the latter end, and this raises questions about the status of Dutch in such debates. Because of course the positions of Dutch and English are highly asymmetrical. American experimental poets may often show a genuine interest in what happens in Holland; but the things that they might be most interested in, poetry generally considered fringe within Dutch literature, is often just unavailable to them.
Of course this simply reflects the cultural realities of globalization; but it also points to a striking contradiction within Dutch culture. The Netherlands has always been a major player in globalization – modern global capitalism was practically invented here. Many aspects of Dutch society are internationalist to the bone: banking, trading, etc; there exists a great openness to the world on this level. On the other hand, there is residual authentic Dutch culture that, from a global point of view, cannot but appear provincial – particularly to the cosmopolitan Dutch themselves. For the sake of cosmopolitan expediency, the Dutch have always been very ready if not eager to ignore their own culture. Symptoms of this abound: from the complete impossibility for foreigners to learn Dutch because the Dutch will always speak English to them to the oft-encountered attitude among Dutch readers that they will only read English, German, French but not Dutch literature, to the near impossibility of establishing enduring Dutch traditions in the arts since generation after generation of artists is again more impressed by outside models. Dutch culture, then, can – and perhaps should – be defined as ‘that which the Dutch are willing to relinquish’.
Of course, all this has been cause for much complaining and, by way of reaction, insipid canonizing debates – as if the establishing of arbitrary lists of ‘great authors’ would somehow resolve the fundamental paradoxes facing a modest-sized culture with a strong cosmopolitan streak. That can only provide Dutch literature with a false identity, one that is entirely based on provincialism. This must be rejected. If, once upon a time, Nijhoff could hold that Dutch poetry was among the world’s finest, we can today only excuse him on the grounds that he had no internet access.
Instead, Dutch literature should find ways to account for its own position between an irreducible provincialism (because its language can’t be widely read) and its globalized culture. It is only in this way that it might be able to address what it means to be a speaker of Dutch in this world. Thus, first of all, the Dutch literary scene should try to follow foreign literatures as much as possible, and always be willing to compare its own production to what it finds abroad. The Dutch should do what the Dutch are traditionally good at, which is to read other languages.
Finally, for a more radical suggestion I turn to the ideas of a Finnish poet, Leevi Lehto, a specialist (among other specialties) in American experimental writing, who has devoted many essays to the issues of translation and the relation of international poetries. He observes that the most widely spoken language in the world today is ‘English spoken as Second – or Nth – Language’, but that this language does not yet have its proper literature. Therefore he advocates the production of ‘barbaric poetry’: that as a Finn, for example, he might write original work in other languages – including, perhaps, languages he can not even read himself (and in fact Lehto has done so). Internationalism, then, is not to be achieved by everybody speaking the same language, but by everybody coming to the same uncontrollable pluriformity of languages from an uncontrollable pluriformity of linguistic positions. Radicalizing a poetics of misprision, language and nation would then no longer be fundamentally linked. Instead there would be a ‘new kind of World Poetry not yet in existence’, a poetry that might involve
independence vis-à-vis National Literatures, including institutionally (…); mixing of languages; borrowing of structures – rhythmical, syntactical – from other languages; writing in one’s non-native languages; inventing new, ad hoc languages; conscious attempts to write for more heterogeneous, non-predetermined audiences… (quoted from his essay ‘Plurifying the Languages of the Trite’)
Recent examples of similar approaches in Dutch literature might include Arjen Duinker’s original work in other languages or Rozalie Hirs’ multi-lingual text-and-electronic-sounds composition, Brug van Babel, based on quotes from poets in many different languages.
To acknowledge globalization in literature would then mean both to read and write in any language that one has access to, one’s own as much as those of others, acknowledging particular backgrounds at the same time as their place in the world.