Poetry, much the same story as with my musical endeavors. The main difference is that creating a poem is easier, or at least faster. Finishing it is another story altogether, the optimal state in which all words, marks, images and sounds are aligned in a unified way, well, I know of no such poem. Still, there is always hope, even for a lesser poet such as me...

Actually, starting from scratch I long resisted reading other people's poetry, this way hoping to carve out a completely new style. It kinda doesn't work this way, and nowadays I really enjoy reading poetry, although I find that most poetry does not really resonate with me. A few heroes are T.S. Eliot (Prufrock, Portrait of a lady, Gerontion, The Waste Land), Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Arthur Rimbaud (although I mostly read the English translations and then try to grasp the French original by pronouncing it, shamefully aware of my lack of French) and finally work by Lucebert, Martinus Nijhoff's (Het Uur U) and more recently Menno Wigman, all Dutch poets.

This means I only have a limited grasp on the subject. So, what do I offer you here? A choice selection of my poems, both Dutch and English (although I find I like working in English more in most cases, due to the richer sounds and also -ironically- I feel more freedom to express myself in a foreign language). The graphical design PDF-files of the poems were made by Lea Sormani. She and I are involved in a collaboration to produce my first book of poems, kindly supported by Shell. These PDF's are a sneak preview of this work. I'm also working together with Nando Harmsen on a photography project, where the goal is to use these designed files and photograph them as posters in an urban environment. This results in an overall image with multiple layers of interpretation. From both these collaborations I've experienced that the creative process becomes much broader with multiple views. I've posted one example of this as well.

As with the music, these works are published under a Creative Commons License.

Creative Commons License

Zijden Wachter

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Netherlands License

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