In 2017 Flemish poet Miriam Van Hee won the Ultima Prize.
Of course, she has won prizes before this : Jan Campert Prize; Dirk Martens Prize; Herman de Connick Prize etc.
But with the Ultima Prize Flemish Culture Award went a bronze statue, and 10,000 euros.
This prize affirmed her status.
She is also a participant in the Puzzling Poetry trilingual innovative app :
studiolouter.nl
She was born in Ghent in the 1950s, studied Slavic Studies at university, and taught Russian in schools.
She has translated from the Russian such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, into Dutch.
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Her first books were met with a little puzzlement, and then categorised : Neoromatic, they said. This was not it, no. A sense of bleakness, exploring of isolation and loneliness, became predominant.
This changed later, and her work took on a new vibrancy, outwardness.
I have misrepresented here. The earlier books were realist, dealt with real subjects. That, of course, is indeed bleak. The world is nowhere near as settled and human-friendly as we think it is.
Her work has sought out places of healing, of peace from our turmoil of experiences that living is.
Her use of language and imagery have marked her out from her peers. Among Flemish writers of her time we have what has been termed the baroque style. Her language was the plain style, the everyday, ‘conversational’ style.
She has much, I find, in common with the Dutch poetry Rutger Kopland. He was also misnamed on first publication as a ‘nostalgic writer’.
If we take his An Empty Spot to Stay : that is what I always wanted to be/ an empty spot for someone to stay – alongside her own earlier writings, we find a similarity of questing style, quiet, ultimately sane, an undeceived awareness. But also an acknowledgement of emotion, and an unwillingness to allow emotion too great a say: a search for balance.
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A phrase we find repeated from those earlier poems is ‘not afraid.’ We find it in Brussels, Jardin Botanique:
… it’s going
to rain, you think, and that you aren’t afraid.
and again, in Sycamores at Nimes Station:
they were growing old and would die
as we would but without fear…
The language betrays us.
There is no drama, no system of valuing here, other than the everyday sensibility we all employ.
The denied fear, with what seems such an easy gesture, is the existential fear, nonetheless, it is THE fear. How can we not be afraid of death?
The rain?
Did we leave the washing out?
No, this is the periphery, a sideways approach, to universal fears.
How can we not be afraid?
We are alive. Now. That is another time. This is the time for life.
That is the subtext.
In the Brussels poem someone asks, about transience:
whether you write to counter that
and if not, is it therapeutic then
Ah, yes the easy questions that demand easy answers. Living is a complex experience. Thinking can make it seem… accessible to thought; but it is not, except in fragments. For living is multi-cognitive.
Elsewhere she writes to the effect that she writes, as if to answer this earlier question, to integrate experiences and sense of self in the world, together.
All quotes are from Judith Wilkinson.
I have written elsewhere with reference to Rutger Kopland, that there does seem a strong phenomenology slant to his writing. I find it here also.
They both employ the ‘conversational’ tone; they both are quiet, ruminating, writers, and both are focussed on the here and now.
It is often said that Rutger Kopland had a anti-metaphysical sensibility.
This did not stop him reading and quoting St Augustine. The trick is to be, and remain, open.
Death is a constant, because it is… inscrutable?… to both writers.
Miriam Van Hee has a lovely poem, Summer End On The Leie, which begins, saying:
this is what a painter would see….
to counter, later:
how do you paint that you’ll never
walk here again, struggling
while your father holds you by the hand
And how that last image conveys so very much. It is, yes, a visual image, but it is also an experience, that struggling child with all her wants, annoyances, moods and excitements tumbling together.
Life, the here-and-now, are not just what is before us, it is how we react to it, what we bring to it, and what we’ll take away. The here-and-now is the focal point, only, of who knows how many dimensions of experience.
There is a still centre to these poems, a carefully discovered spot from where the writer can choose and manipulate words and language, mood and sensibility, to produce such multi-layered writing.
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So how does she achieve her effects?
She eschews all format other than line-integrity and stanza form. There are no upper case letters, no stops; the only punctuation allowed are commas, to emphasise/clarify meaning.
And yet the lines are strongly metrical; there is the echoic whisper of assonance.
The line follows thought, and breaks where thought moves. It takes great craft, skill, to arrange the line like this. The thought is often ruminative, considering a past action or event – after all, whatever we are aware of is a past event. To register a real now in a meaningful and full way still entails a future action of recording. All records are of past events.
Anne Marie Musschoot in her essay With A View of the Landscape, the Poetic World of Miriam Van Hee, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55747832.pdf writes of the search for interiority in her writing. It is as though part of an equation with ‘out there’. The search for self space is very much in keeping with the European experience in the time of closed frontiers, entrenched political confrontation – to encapsulate, part of the Cold War experience for those on or near the front lines.
This can also be found in her use of language, avoiding rhetoric and big concepts. Her language persuades as all language does, is always rhetorical to a degree, but she asks us to listen and to also prompts us to think. The essay says: ‘Great’ feelings are expressed simply and unassumingly, in a manner averse to pathos and reduced to everyday proportions, in language closely resembling natural speech.
That is, not street speech : the brag and self-promotion of ‘street’, nor the ‘social glue’ of like-sounds, phrases, but communication that is loaded with gender, culture, one’s time, one’s experience and response to one’s time.
She is often considered a ‘domestic’ writer, concerned with home, children, limited environment. There is always, as we noted above, the other part of her equation. The ‘distance’, and the longing are part of the exploration, mapping, of self’s space in collective society. This in itself is an act of refusal that is also a positive act of valuing.
An interview in stellarmarispoetry https://stellamarispoetry.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/buitenland-miriam-van-hee/
has:
The four elements – earth, water, air and fire – keep playing their game; every new landscape offers a treasure: you remembered / all those sunsets / behind the dark forests / breath-taking / sunsets. Apart from the different landscapes, she also ‘touches’ the earth’s origins: the earth’s crust moved and continents / they rose as tall, rebellious children, / they crashed / on others and out the fire / rose mountains, heavy and mad.
We also read in this article:
besides,/the word apricot disappeared and Moscow,/
which I would very much want to read as a reference to Inger Christensen’s Alfabet (published 1981), along with referencing the status of opennness of her study-centre, heart, of Slavic Europe and Asia.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of Russia, coincided with an opening up in her work.
So, is she a poet of resistance?
If we consider the Russian poets she has translated, then we can see that all were poets of resistance, poets of personal value in mass society.
Miriam Van Hee’s choice of non-punctual, upper-case avoidance, writing style, echoes the approach by East European poets in the Cold War. There – see Zbigniew Herbert, for example – the style challenges the monolithic power-structures imposed upon them. By inverting the grandiosity, style, structures of discourse, of the Socialist Realist ideology, they sought to undermine its energy-sources, their tentacular reaching into lives.
Miriam Van Hee grew up in that environment, in the midst of the post-War world of the Soviet experiment, and its human costs, and of the West’s at times maniacal responses and posturing.
Also, the path Miriam Van Hee has travelled in her books bears many similarities in tone and response to that of the East German writer Elke Erb.
Elke Erb has relentlessly sought out the self-value, not just of herself, but for each of us. She has also sought to identify power-structures in society, cultures, social interactions, and to refuse and defuse them, whether they be gender-based, economic (which, of course, are all inter-connected), political etc.
I argue that both experienced similar journeys towards wholeness, and away from vacuous but vicious social and political constructs.
Other voices are always given equal weight in Miriam Van Hee’s poems, the ‘I’ does not declaim or dominate. There is a searching out of the workings of democracy in this.
If we look again at the Summer End On The Leie, it begins:
this is what a painter would see :
the bleached grassy bank, chestnuts
and lime trees….
On the other bank a walker, and his
thoughts, how do you paint those
………..
……………
from where we’re seated you can’t see
the water itself and I’m still wondering how you
paint distances…..
……………….
……………… and how you capture the past
when you still walked there yourself
how do you paint that you’ll never
walk there again…….
Is there a teasing-out of who, and how that who, holds the definite interpretations? In effect, the accepted translation of experience and reality? In other words, who determines the power-relations between people, between personal and public, between personal knowledge and accepted knowledge?
In The Pyramid of The Sun (Teotihuacan) she writes of how the singular personal act of climbing the pyramid reveals further and further views. Of what? Of how the pyramid is part of bigger complex, how other pyramids show further off, how houses and dusty roads appear : ‘a kind one connectedness’.
The poem ends:
you thought of the birds again, you’d
always been in awe of them, the way
they’d spread their wings at the last moment,
to set sail in the sky
A form of transcendence? Of the ability of the singular human experience to experience a kind of ‘freedom’?
In Kriekerijstraat, Sint-Amandsberg , she writes:
there are gardens that have escaped someone’s
watchful eye…..
(Kriekkerijstraat, is the part of Ghent the writer grew up. If you look it up on Google Maps you find an incredibly clean, litterless, un-graffitti’d area. Astonishing. Like somewhere that has indeed ‘escaped someone’s watchful eye’)
If my argument has validity, then it may be possible to read those early books, the snowed-in landscapes, the isolated and shut-down discourse, as empathetic responses to the Cold War human experiences of cultures she found sympathy with early-on. Enough to pursue three year’s of highly concentrated study, and many, many years teaching, and translating.
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The fullest current resource for the writing of Miriam Van Hee, in translation, is the generous selection of Judith Wilkinson, and available on Poetry International.
The site also has a great introduction to the writer, and lists availabilty. There is also a generous bibliography:
https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/866/Miriam-Van-hee/en/tile
The Shoestring Press selection of her work, Instead of Silence (1997), has long been out of print.
The translator, Judith Wilkinson does certainly need mention, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Wilkinson
Her own website:
judithwilkinson.net
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