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Maintenant #14 – Jan-Willem Anker
I cannot imagine the writing process ever being very free, but on the other hand I never know what the poem will look like when I start. I’m used to begin a poem with just a couple of images, some notes I made or a very vague thought, an impression or sensation. I guess that’s nothing to be surprised about. The ground from which I start is rather observational than philosophical, although perhaps that’s changing in favour of philosophy these days. I’m not a philosopher nor a philosophical poet, but sometimes I have an idea, which is something completely different than an impression. Much clearer. Knowing somehow more beforehand.
In the fourteenth of his Maintenant series SJ Fowler interviews the Dutch poet Jan-Willem Anker.
Five Poems
Morning, noon, night, morning, the stubble pins through your cellulitic jaw, a
beard beards your mug and keeps coming, runs wild despite you. A thing within
you approaching completion without you. Mesmeric.
Someone tells of his father buying a dead matador’s uniform. He’d washed out
the bloodstains, helped his son into it, and photographed him like that.
Your face will be pine forest by morning; picture stables in Spain where fighting
bulls loll in uneasy sleep. The arena dark, deserted still.
By Jan-Willem Anker.