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‘Ah, the comfort of a comparison’
The Poetry of Herman de Coninck
Herman de Coninck (1944-1997) was at the time of his death principal editor of the literary periodical Nieuw Wereldtijdschrift. As an essayist he wrote infectiously about poetry; but first and foremost he was, as he had been since his debut in 1969 with Lithe Love (De lenige liefde), the most popular poet in Flanders. The main reason for this success is that his poetry is so recognisable. De Coninck wrote about subjects close to home. And he did this in language of rare virtuosity which is at the same time accessible, which makes the reader think: I could do that too, if I knew how. And finally, he always took a balanced approach to his themes: humorous and playful, but without diminishing their underlying seriousness and tragic element.
The dominance of this playful tone, coupled with a typically adolescent love theme, seems to me to explain the public's continued preference for this first volume compared to his later work. Besides, the age-group to which this theme is calculated to appeal is precisely the one which still takes the most lively interest in poetry.
De Coninck's debut was in line with the atmosphere of New Realism which was coming to the fore in Flanders around 1970: a poetry grounded in the astonished observation of reality, expressed in simple, direct language. But right from the start he put his own stamp on it, as is evident from the way he formulated his approach in 1972: ‘I write poetry because it is the one genre above all others in which by formal isolation one can give to a fragment of language a brilliance and intensity almost unknown in life, however close to real life the poem may be. It is that rare form of illusion that I am concerned with. I am a New Realist only in so far that I believe that one can make this illusion more subtle and more convincing by putting as much reality as possible into it. But however realistic a poem may seem, its intensity is always greater than that of real life, and in that sense it is also unreal.’
This creed, in which the main concern of his poetry, for all its normality and comprehensibility, is for that subtle illusion, that poetic transformation, is also set down in a poem in which he confronts the miniature, imitation country of Madurodam (the poetic illusion) with the actual city of Amsterdam (reality):
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referring to, let's say, madurodam
- and never when referring to amsterdam -
I think that one should look on literary
realism in the same way, let it be
a likeness, certainly, but for God's sake
from time to time still let a woman
utter some shrill squeals of delight
The poems in Lithe Love bear witness to a great flexibility, a mental and stylistic suppleness, which can link such very dissimilar areas of experience as, for instance, nature and politics: ‘water, sometimes it runs straight on / like an ideology (...)’, or the experience of language and expression in language: ‘in the word “armchair” I relax / as in an armchair’.
De Coninck's sophisticated use of these and similar techniques, such as the play on set phrases, on literal and figurative meanings, makes this poetry seem spontaneous, fresh, almost improvised.
The second volume, As Long as the Snow Lies (Zolang er sneeuw ligt, 1975) has two parts. The first is called ‘Oh look, how real’, a title taken from the Madurodam poem quoted earlier. And this section is closest to the original volume: light-hearted observations, anecdotes, exercises in the playful and creative treatment of everyday things grown somewhat dull and dusty with familiarity. The techniques used are basically the same. A rhinoceros is described like this: ‘He is as thick / as a thick neck’; or, on the economy:
and again, zero economic growth must be
something like this: being on a motorway,
finding you've gone one kilometre too far,
and then having to drive another twenty
The volume's second part shifts the accent to a more personal lyric of feeling. Biographical circumstances probably have something to do with this: some years before, De Coninck had lost his wife in a tragic road accident. A good many of the poems deal with that fact or its consequences. But this never descends to biographical anecdotism. De Coninck's great technical mastery of his material enabled him to transform this drama in his personal life into objectivised images which the reader can fill in for himself. This increase in thematic depth, continued in subsequent volumes, automatically brought with it a reduction in the euphoric word-games. The humorous element is still there, but it becomes as it were calmer and more introverted, focused on dealing with feelings which in their raw state are so painful and unmanageable as to block all enterprise and initiative. Only by processing them can they again become the building-blocks of a flexible existence. And that is exactly what happens here. As one of the programmatic poems in a later volume puts it: ‘The notion, so very useful in poetry, / that you can do things with emotions too.’
Another way of formulating this change of direction is to say that the
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accent shifts from external to internal, from observable reality to one emotionally felt. Still better would be to say that the element of feeling, present from the beginning, now becomes more visible. Extratextual elements too, particularly the development of a neo-romantic youthful poetry in Flanders, focus attention more on this. No romantic nostalgia, though, in De Coninck; that is integrated into a plan for living that looks to the future:
and yet even the night is not
without hope, as long as the snow lies
it is never completely dark, no,
there's the light of a sort of faith
that it will never get utterly dark.
As long as there's snow, there is hope.
The volume Sounding like an Oboe (Met een klank van hobo, 1980) continued this movement towards acceptance of life and working with the emotions. The oboe (in Dutch, ‘hobo’) of the title is among the saddestsounding of instruments; at the same time, with a play on the American word ‘hobo’, it is the ‘tramp among instruments’. It symbolises melancholy and homelessness in time and space. In these poems melancholy implies a tension between here and there, between now and then, in which both poles are equally important. The present gains in intensity because the past is still there, the absence of absolute happiness gives a deeper hue to the limited happiness which does exist:
Sadness is a photo from 20 years ago.
Family, still together, still in health,
is then. Surrounded by a frame of now.
The now it is that holds the past together.
The volume is constructed more or less as a series of love poems, describing the experience of love at different ages. It begins with the fresh eroticism of puberty, still ‘full of dangers’ and ambiguous fears, and ends with the inexpressible tenderness surrounding a deathbed: ‘he is not there now in as many ways / as once he was there’
This chronological arrangement means that awareness of time becomes a central theme, and with that awareness of time the paradoxical sadness mentioned above. The poet's position in time is very hesitant, invariably ambiguous. The past is simultaneously remembered with nostalgia and kept at a distance. The losses inflicted by time are transmuted into gain. What time does with the past is compared to what it does with fruit: it makes preserves of them, a concentrate of summer. Or what it does with wine: intensifies the quality.
This paradoxality permeates the poet's whole experience of reality and feelings. Very many of these poems seem to be attempts at making the contradictions inseparable from life perceptible in language. It is as though he frames new definitions of love, happiness, grief, silence: ‘Silence is the difference between saying nothing and having said it all already’
Sometimes such paradoxical formulations are framed as aphoristic generalisations, sometimes they are embodied in brief stories, anecdotes: ‘We
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walk, the two of us, through the autumn day. And in spring too I feel no different.’
The contradictions do not disappear, but reach a wise and smiling reconciliation; no extreme, one-dimensional feelings here, quite the reverse: shadowy, ambiguous states of mind such as melancholy, tedium, pleasure and happiness too, but never in the form of delight or ecstasy. For happiness is, after all, ‘knowing that it's something not for you. And being well content with that even so.’
It is clear that De Coninck had gradually moved right away from neorealism. The only thing in his later work that still recalls it is his concern to write comprehensible, reader-friendly poetry. With Memory's Acres (De hectaren van het geheugen, 1985) he went a step further, this time towards hardness and away from sentimentality.
There are four sections, with an opening poem, ‘Genesis’, as prologue. It is about Adam, ready and complete on the sixth day of Creation. From this starting position he sees the world, and it doesn't attract him much, all that silent hugeness: ‘And then God said: now your turn. No, said Adam.’
This sets the tone for the whole volume. It is not an easy tone to define. It has to do with being lost, with emptiness, awareness of time and death, a sense of being superfluous, of wandering in a disorganised confusion and longing for things to be clear. ‘Mountains of Indifference’ (‘Bergen van onverschilligheid’) is the title of the first, and longest, part. These are poems which draw most of their imagery from nature and the seasons, mainly in the densely wooded region of the Ardennes. Not the idyllic Ardennes of the tourist, but their desolation, their greyness, the indifference of everything there to the man among them. Nature here is both a mirror-image of the poet and the presence of that totally different Other that ignores the poet and his words, leading a life imperturbably its own.
There follows a series of emotion-based poems about his wife and daughter, everyday domestic life, which with their humorous sense of proportion and more anecdotal structure are the closest to his earlier work.
The third series, ‘Broken Glass in the Sun’ (‘Glasscherven in de zon’), brings together poems on the death of his mother. These verses derive their force from the clash of tenderness and ruthless harshness, from a brutal kind of respect, which describes every last detail of the mother's disintegration so as to love what remains and be desolated when that too is gone:
Your skin translucent as a glass
that you have drunk to the last drop:
yourself. And I, not there alas
to let go of your hands, their fingers ten,
when you had got so far, so very far.
And to have held them tight, just before then.
The volume ends with ‘On Foot across Lethe’ (‘Te voet over de Lethe’), poems inspired by Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and Wolf Wondratschek's Die Einsamkeit der Männer. With these poems De Coninck bade a final farewell to the image that had pursued him since his debut with Lithe Love. That volume's light, playful eroticism of the imagination is now
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totally superseded by illusionless reality, tragedy and loneliness - the loneliness of men with their pathetic bumbling. And the scornful superiority women feel for it. The first poem in this section ends like this:
For women have powerful sex-organs, high wounds,
mounts of Venus, caverns, creases
in which lost nights can never again be found.
like Mona Lisa with tourists and the moon with the sea,
breathtakingly, and with a touch of something like scorn.
These are the most pitiless poems De Coninck had yet written, shocking sometimes, devoid of illusions, about man in all his shabbiness, stripped bare, sucked dry, reduced to what he is: ‘His prick shrivels. He hears his balls grating.’ In these poems De Coninck achieves a combination of toughness and clarity. The toughness necessary to write poetry about softness, doubt and yearning. The clarity that is essential in poems about the untidy moodiness of feelings.
In the later collections, Singular (Enkelvoud, 1991) and Breast Stroke (Schoolslag, 1994), a dual movement is perceptible: on the one hand towards poems whose inspiration is frankly autobiographical, about parents, children, marriage and love; on the other towards greater detachment and depersonalisation, in poems occasioned by photos and works of art and others which give greater prominence to the language itself. With hindsight this ambivalence was always there, but now it results in two quite distinct types of poetry. This is very noticeable in Singular, where the first series, ‘The Plural of Happiness’ (‘Het meervoud van geluk’) brings together almost blatantly sentimental verses about and for his children, while the poems in the second section, ‘Without’ (‘Zonder’), could be termed exercises in self-less lyric, sometimes even formulated programmatically, as in the poem ‘44’ which begins with the stanza: ‘Without self, without subject. / Harp hung on willows. / Another instrument acquired.’
At the end of the poem that other instrument which is to replace the harp turns out to be a rake, played like a violin with a saw for a bow: ‘A Little Song’. But in this he is not entirely successful. For the strength and the limitation of Herman de Coninck's poetry lay in its personal voice, even if it sometimes sounds indirectly, through observations, comparisons, descriptions of scenes, photos or anecdotes.
After all, De Coninck's main stylistic weapon was always the startling comparison, explicit or implicit. His poetry is of a kind that makes connections, which tries to put shattered reality back together again and in doing so offers comfort: not seeking to find a solution, but to make solitude more bearable by linking it to other solitudes. Memory's Acres already contained the following stanza:
Ah, the comfort of a comparison,
it almost helps. As soon as I hear the word ‘like’
it all becomes less alone.
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And the last poem in Singular, which deals with the search for concealment, ends like this:
So a comparison looks for
Night claps the book shut.
This same division between biographical-anecdotal poems and exercises in detachment reappears in Breast Stroke. The first series, entitled ‘The Spot’ (‘De plek’), contains verses on the indifferent vastness of nature and the quasi-superfluous presence within it of mankind: ‘Life is lived between two sneers.’ Contrasting with this are the sections ‘Mechelen’ (De Coninck's birthplace), about crucial moments in the poet's life, and ‘Pastorale’, about his wife and children. Poems with a great deal of love, compassion and directly felt sentiment in them. They seem to be poems of intimate closeness, akin in their playfulness to those of Lithe Love. But they were written with the wisdom of a fifty-year-old, they bask in the glow of autumnal pleasure, of at once holding fast and letting go: ‘I'm already busy remembering, but / it's still so much today, so gladly.’
The whole volume thus becomes an exercise in detachment, in inertia, in presence. This paradoxical combination even comes to form the essence of De Coninck's poetry. The poem ‘Poetry’ (‘Poëzie’) says it plainly, and once again in the form of a comforting comparison: ‘A picture needs a frame, / as happiness mortal fear.’
hugo brems
Translated by Tanis Guest.
Herman de Coninck's last collection, Fingerprints (Vingerafdrukken), was still in preparation when this yearbook went to press.
Herman de Coninck (1944-1997) (Photo by Klaas Koppe).
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