Poet
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Jan Baeke 1956-... country: the Netherlands language: Dutch |
is a poet and translator who began his career as a librarian and currently works with the Amsterdam Film Museum. For an anthology of modern English poets he helped compile, he translated poems by Lavinia Greenlaw and Liz Rockhead. For an anthology of Welsh poetry he translated work of Deryn Rees-Jones. As a poet, Jan Baeke likes to involve his readers in bizarre situations. A drawing room where horses dance gracefully, a train compartment full of dogs, a ‘decade, season, time of night’ in which buses are ‘no longer cherished’, or the house of a man who lives with a saw. Even so, his poetry cannot just be labelled ‘absurdist’; however unlikely the locations, images, observations and trains of thought in Baeke’s poetry may be, they always appear to convey some worthwhile truth about the reality of our lives. Baeke’s second collection, Zo is de zee, contains a series of poems about great natural scientists, such as Newton, Mendel, Copernicus, who each in their own field of study have formulated a set of rules that reality still seems to obey. In the first poem, serving as a kind of motto for the collection, Jan Baeke confesses to wishing to achieve something similar as a poet: his poetry is ‘an investigation’ – not, of course, a ‘proper investigation’ but one lacking ‘the easy certainty / of solid proof / linking congeners and phenomena.’ In the words of critic Hans Groenewegen: ‘Each poem is another attempt at discovering the laws that govern our world.’ Reading Jan Baeke’s intriguing ‘investigations’, we once again realize how un-obvious, incoherent and threatening the world around us really is. Author: Erik Menkveld Poets: |
