Frech: I wanted to start by asking you some questions about the themes of your book, and maybe the title is a good place to start.

Hirsch: The title's familie gebiedt. First of all, the verb "gebieden" means "to obligate someone," and if you leave the "t" it means "area." So the title means family area or obligations you have or are forced upon you by your family. So it's a word play.

F: How do you see family obligation played out in the poems, in the themes of the poems themselves?

H: Since it's my debut book, I have a lot of poetry that was written January 2005 to May 2006, just one year of poetry. Most of the poems are about my family and my place in my family, my position to my mother, my brother, my sister, and the history of my family.

F: Your place in the family, your obligation to your family: were those still in flux for you? Were you uncertain when you started the book? Did the writing help to clarify?

H: A lot, because I was simply writing poetry and things kept popping up. There was a pattern: all the poems are written in a "you" and "they" and not an "I." There are only one or two poems that have an "I" in them.

F: I recognized that.

H: ... distance and finally when I finished the book, completed it, I realized I wrote something about what my family is. And my second book that I'm writing right now is about what my poetry did with me and how it changed my self perspective, and ego. I played my own psychologist probably.

F: So the absence of the first person speaker in the poems wasn't a conscious decision as you were writing the poems.

H: I tried to get some distance on who I am, probably.

F: Do you think distance was a device, even if unconscious, of looking at and thinking about the self, an effort at disconnection, distance?

H: I think it's disconnection, distancing yourself from the thing you want to write about, a birds eye view on what's actually happened and things that were present while my parents raised me and told me about my grandfather, themes that kept coming back (great grandfather drinking too much); some patterns kept coming back, and I realized that I'm probably not that different from my father. It's kind of scary. You want to be far from your father. I simply tried to figure out who I am, how I'm built or composed. My mother has a history and my father has a history and that makes me. What is it that I am? You know, you try to give your kids direction, help them grow, but you inject your own fears into raising them. That's what this book is about. My second book will be about what actually happened to me while I was realizing what I was writing about, and things I struggle with right now.

F: Can we talk a bit about the craft of poetry? You said "distance yourself from what you want to write about" which for a lot of people may sound like exactly the opposite of what you should do in writing a poem.

H: Right.

F: So, I'm wondering if distancing yourself from what you want to write about is in fact a method for entering into the subject matter of a poem.

H: I think every subject matter needs a different approach. You have a certain way of playing with language and words you know, but if I write about my family and the questions I raise about my family I have to distance myself to write about it; if I want to write about a song I hear every morning in my room, it's different. I use different words or rhythm; I try to get as close to my subject or as far from my subject as I can be. If I write about something I struggle with in myself, I might write with short sentences and a very rhythmic cadence because I struggle with it, so I try to write my poetry that it translates what I think and feel directly. I cannot write 32 poems in the same style, because it's impossible. You have so many different emotions. If someone tries to piss you off, you can react in a number of different ways -- it depends on how you woke up that morning or if you're hungry or mad or have a head-ache or if someone tries to annoy me and I'm in a happy mood, I react in a different way to that menace than if someone ran me off my bike and I'm pissed and I want to hit someone. It's all moment based emotion.

F: It sounds like what you're saying about distancing yourself from subject matter has a lot to do with what you're saying in another respect about patterning: you've suggested a number of times that part of pattern is the incorporation of variation. As you've said, you can't write 32 poems exactly the same way because the occasions or the topics or the themes of those poems don't call for the exact same method.

Do you think that's at work in the book as well: the patterning of language, the patterning of poetic language balanced with a variation, the way of seeing that pattern in a new and different and fresh way?

H: One of the reviewers of my book commented that the style was very jumpy: one time it's easy going, open language, very understandable, other times it's thick, like syrup, so you have to read it 5, 10 times to get into it.

Yes, I don't sit down and try to dictate that I write this or that kind of poetry 32 times because I write a subconscious, a time-and-moment based poetry. I'm trying to write prose right now, and I've put it into the form of a letter to a deceased family member. So, I'm writing a poem in a prose, letter form, and I'll probably put it in my next book.

My new book is developing into an ever more jumpy style of poetry. I probably rid myself of the questions: "Do I have to do this? Is this poetry? Is this correct or not? Can I do this?" I think that's often a first book frame of mind. I've thrown it out the window. I said no, it's a thing I want to do, to come back to my style of writing. I have my own language, people say, because I use certain rhythmic or old or bold words. Someone could use a few words, and you still don't understand the meaning or mood, but you can use one word that is a sentence in itself. You can play with putting one after another after another, and you have five heavy words. I write as it occurs to me and as I feel I have to write the poem.

F: You mentioned having written a letter to an ancestor or dead relative, so I wanted to address family again, the way in which in familie gebiedt the family seems both a source of connectedness and one of obligation, not only obligation to them, but things seemingly wind up in your DNA and as a consequence you behave in certain ways because they've been patterned into your life, so there's that kind of obligation in the book as well.

H: The letter I described is for my new book, it's also about family: what that family did for me, or the way I turned out and all the fears I have and the failures, the reinventing myself. I'm in a weird period in my life right now.

The thing is I wrote famile gebiedt and after a while my father e-mailed me some information about my grandfather. He is a Holocaust survivor. His sister died in Auschwitz. I knew she'd died in '43 or '44. It's something that has hovered over my family for as long as I've been alive, but something you don't talk about -- it's like a shadow. I was fed up with it, the war stories, because it was so far away, but on the other hand I knew about the family history. One day my father e-mailed the actual Red Cross statistics (ones they had received from the Nazi's themselves, after the camps were liberated), and I actually saw the death certificate information and it was so sick, so dry, simple figures, and it hit me in the stomach, it hit me in the teeth. I was totally disoriented by it.

It hit me so hard -- Name, Age, Deceased -- simply figures like adding a list of cows or pigs brought to slaughter -- just a number. I knew about it -- I'm an historian -- but when you see those numbers in relation to your own family, it hits home. And afterwards I started writing more personal poetry. My next book is about what this family history has done to me emotionally.

I wrote a letter to her. Her name was Beatrice and I really like Dante's Decameron, so the writing started rolling for me. I have a Decameron or maybe a Faustian theme. She died when she was 23. She was simply a woman in stories my father used to tell me. She was so far away, and yet there's a connection being made. And that letter after having written familie gebiedt helped me ask -- ok, now what about me? What does this history and knowing the full history do to me? How emotional for us: my father, my sister, my brother, for me. You don't talk about it because it's so long ago, but it's still part of you.

F: I think there's a lot of emotion in this first book. Maybe the emotion has a presence very much like the photograph on the cover itself, which I wanted to ask you about. The photo has ghost images, the same people who are in the immediately recognizable photograph also have a ghostly and larger presence.

H: Actually, you're the first one who's seen that of those who have talked to me about my book. The picture itself is a family picture from 1904/1905 or so. The harsh looking man with a cigar in his mouth is my great grandfather. He was not an easy guy -- you can see that. He was on a business trip; the rest of the people could be family or friends or fellow travelers.

My girlfriend is a graphic designer, and she designed the book. She played with the photo and created this ghostly presence. In the family area people are born, they die, but they continue to play a very important role in the lives of children to come.

F: And did you know this man, your great grandfather?

H: No, he died before the war. I believe in 1932 or so.

F: And you've described him as intense or harsh.

H: I know from my grandfather.

F: Was that a trait that's seemed to ghost its way through your family?

H: My father is a really sweet man. . . . But people look at this photo and say "I see your father." It's the way he sits down, as if he doesn't want to be there, a cigarette hanging from his mouth with an attitude of "get on with it - take the picture." Impatient. And I have the same thing. I don't want to be in pictures.

My girlfriend took time to design this book, choosing brown ink for the letters, the text, for instance. People have said it's a very earthy, elemental poetry, clay-like. It's clay you write. So we used brown letters, and no one saw it. Readers in the Netherlands are a bit sloppy, you could say.

In the author's photo on the back, I'm standing in front of his house in Berlin, in the Fasanenstrasse 24 Berlin. There's a museum there now (Kathe Kollwitz Museum). It's all coincidence, by the way.

F: And you look very bold, I wouldn't say intense necessarily, but bold in the picture.

H: My publisher wanted the photograph, and readers now have said about the sunglasses I'm wearing, "You have something to hide," speculating about the distance in the poems, as if I'm distancing myself from my feelings. But it's all a coincidence.

F: So, you think readers are working too hard in some readings and not hard enough in other readings.

H: Right, exactly.

F: Let me ask you about a couple poems. "eenmaal daags/once daily or once every day". These lines in particular seem to articulate something about connectedness but disconnection:

krieken van de dag ingenomen

stapt de wereld van onder het geheel
aan de hemel drijvende wolken de wereld in

[crack of dawn taken in

the world steps from below the whole
in the sky drifting clouds into the world]

H: Basically, it's about daybreak and it's been done so many times. At that time, I was listening to Wagner, and the poem is Wagnerian. A reviewer once said of the book and poems that I am Wagnerian in style. I had this image of a break of dawn with all its power and what kind of words do you use when you want to describe that over-whelming feeling? There are a lot of words in the poem that you'd find in the older Dutch language, words like "krieken van de dag."

F: Crack of dawn

H: Yes. I love playing around with words like that. I like the way it sounds.

F: I highlight those lines in particular because you were saying earlier that the book doesn't have personal emotion, and yet what's happening here cosmically seems not only personified (in which the cosmic, the planetary are doing very human things), but there's also an intensity of impulse, necessity, and emotion. Phrases like cracking and stepping out of, coming together and stepping away from seem to happen on a grand scale in similar ways as they happen in families: things in relation to each other.

H: Yes, it's me watching the sun and the moon do their thing. I watch the moon and the stars everyday, my bed is at the window, and everyday I am still amazed at the look of the moon. My girlfriend is better at this than I am. I almost forget how to look at the world, and she's more receptive to the little things. We still look at the moon: everyday it's different, and so many people don't see that anymore. Every time you look at it it's different. Maybe it's Wagnerian, but I tried to put that kind of euphoric moment into these poems. It's funny that you felt that - no one has asked me about this poem.

F: I found it very moving. The absence of the "I" seemed evident to me as I was looking through the book. I thought, he's not in here. And yet maybe like the ghost image on the cover, there's a ghost of you in all these poems. So when I came to "eenmaal daags", the drama of these interplanetary relations -- the sun, the moon, the earth, some of them more immediately connected than others -- seems full of drama: the greeting, the separating seem invested with emotion even though it isn't you, Lucas, saying "I'm feeling these emotions." Those emotions seem embedded in the act of the poem itself.

H: Some people say the poems are devoid of emotion, but there's a great deal of emotion. For instance, tension, like a spring if you compress it. Even when I am distant from my subject, the voice is still heavy with emotion: anger or blame. Some figure it out and some don't, but if they read it with attention, that emotion's there.

F: The emotion's available, though it doesn't necessarily cry out in the way that another vein of poetry might cry out in the first person. But the emotion in a poem like this in which the "I" doesn't mention himself is very much felt.

H: I taught a class in art school in Utrecht. They were all graphic designers and the professor asked me to talk to them about my poetry and the way I write. I constructed it like those models from chemistry class of atomic structures, with the atoms and the connective strings. You can look at a poem like a three-dimensional object, turning it over, upside down, change the perspective of the reader everytime. I perceive you in some way: I hear you, I see you move, you talk in a certain way, and I make a picture of you in my head. Someone else sees you and makes the same story, but recognizes different aspects and can point out other features of you. That's not what this poem is about, but that's the technique I use. Again, like a three-dimensional DNA map from the first line which is probably very difficult to read.

F: I was drawn to this line: "You must cause pain according to the agreement" and the repetition of this word "afspraak" and the "afstand" - a deliberate play of repetition.

H: There's an expression "afspraak is afspraak" - if you say you're going to do it, you're going to do it.

F: And yet what you've said about family is that you wind up doing things you never said you were going to do.

H: Or you want to do simply because it's family. We do things automatically sometimes simply because they're family. When some ask us to do things, we say no. When mother asks, we do it, we don't question. Mother knows all, but what if mother doesn't know all? She's also human, like I am, mistaken at times, but we're brought up to believe mother is all right. It was when I started writing that I realized that parents (and conventional wisdom) aren't all right.

That's probably what this poem, "circular family story," is about. And those students I taught made visual images inspired by this poem: drawings, videos, the inside of a tower with many steps, someone running down, then finally getting to the bottom and realizing they were at the top again, and still running, ongoing. And that's what "circular family story" is about. When I have children, the same thing will happen, an unending story only seen from a different perspective. The grammar of this poem is challenging for most readers and the shifts in perspective are confusing for some conventional Dutch readers.

F: I was drawn to moments like this because they call attention to themselves,

H: ... very commanding ...

F: Yes, very commanding, and to arrive at this poem in this late stage of the book and suddenly the "I" is in the poem and to say "must cause pain" seems alarming as a line onto itself.

H: Sure, something for the psychologist probably.

F: We've mentioned the absence of the "I," but the other obvious feature throughout the book is the lack of punctuation and capitalization. Can you tell me about the poetics, your sense of deliberately crafting as you write and revise?

H: I have different poetics; there's probably not one. I don't use capital letters or punctuation because you have to be able to express yourself in a way that you don't have to use them - they're tools that underline emotions. I think the words themselves and the way you organize them or put them in a rhythm should speak for themselves and don't need punctuation. People use punctuation to signal the end of a sentence or phrase, but why not simply end the sentence and begin again? So, punctuation can easily become an excuse.

I struggle with it. With my prose-poems I had to force myself to use it, but I think I may go back to the basic lack of punctuation and let the reader find it. If you have a good rhythm in your poems, readers can easily know where I end the sentence. Some might think I cut off my lines randomly, but I've really thought about those decisions thoroughly.

F: And what governs the line for you? Sometimes the line in your book is a syntactical unit onto itself, and other times the sentence seems to run over or break in the midst of a line. So I'm wondering because the decision about line you've said is very deliberate, what factors into that decision for you?

H: The rhythm that it has . . . and as now I've paused to think . . . at other times you can blurt out a sentence - some words have to be said to create a rhythm. I think that's it. I give pauses in my poetry creating long and short sentences. Sometimes it runs out quickly like a jazz song and maybe one or two words can help create a pause to let the reader think about what he's just read. Rhythm and pausing can create a buzz in poetry. If I want to describe a busy crowd in a café at night, I probably write long sentences. Then suddenly you realize you are very alone in that crowd - pause in the long sentence. The realization is in the poetry.

F: You mentioned that the longer lines feel like a kind of jazz and you talked about a buzz that happens in terms of the pacing, the pulsing, the pausing of some of the lines. Do you feel the poems are jazz or music inspired? Is jazz something you feel drawn to, the improvisational aspect?

H: Yes, I play the piano. I used to play a lot of jazz, and I like to listen to different kinds of music, because each has its own feeling and emotion. I'm drawn to jazz and bee-bop - the intensity, even in the easy-going jazz, is energetic. And yet calm. And I think the way jazz musicians play their instruments is like poets - or the other way around. I can imagine Miles Davis having had a bad day will play very differently or improvise differently, when he has had cocaine. That's what I like - it's a moment in time you write this poem. I write a poem at a certain time of day and you come up with some lines and work with them. Most of these poems were written in one sitting, then you change it a little bit. Most of the time it takes about an hour to write a poem for me.

If I were to write it even five minutes later, I would probably use other words. I have to get it out of my system - put it down and work with it.

F: So, it sounds very much like improvisation in that it's part of, responsive to a moment, rather than a scripted, written record. Instead, it's a record of the moment.

H: The prose letter I started typing fifteen minutes after returning to earth. I was so overwhelmed by what I saw I couldn't process it immediately. With that intensity I tried to write this letter without turning sentimental, without rambling on about Auschwitz itself.

F: It's so loaded.

H: Yes, it's loaded. I almost never use the word "God" in my poetry because it's so big. You must be very careful if you use it. So I think a lot of the poetry, I write it in a conscious, unconscious way.

F: And yet the poetics seem crafted. One of the features I noticed throughout the book is the tendency toward couplets. You seem to love this pattern: the three line stanza followed by the couplet.

H: Yes, it's probably a visual thing. And it also depends on what I describe. If I write about the bald man, it's about my father. When I've written about him, I've written about the pressures on my father from his father, the Holocaust survivor. So you don't handle it with a jumpy, jazz style. I try to capture some kind of calm, basic, understandable, not too dramatic, realistic poetry - a more respectful, balanced way.

F: Maybe that's part of the "earthiness" the reviews are talking about. These poems feel very grounded somehow, in part because they pace themselves so well while they're taking on subject matter that isn't particular to the individual but much larger - a larger collective experience.

H: That could be. And it's probably why some say it's so jumpy - you don't have one emotion. If I write about my father and his experience with his father - it's called Second Generation - it's so complex. You have to be careful what you put down to avoid a maudlin, clichéd tone.

F: That experience of "Second Generation" is present in the U.S. as well.

H: Yes, my father is not a pathetic someone because his father was in a concentration camp. Not at all. He's as human as I am, and you have to be careful with that as subject matter.

F: Poems mirror each other in their crafting as we've described already: couplets, opening tercets followed by couplets, etc. The whole section "at the borders" seems the most unified in the poems' length and shape.

H: The funny thing is, I started writing poems in 2002 when I wrote my thesis. I have always been writing a little bit, but not in the intense way I do it now. In 2002 I started performing, reciting a lot on stage, poetry slams. I toured around with a poetry slam group. I was the only page-oriented poet. The rest were great on stage, and I was mumbling, but I had a great time: sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

Finally, we split up because of girls and drugs. In fact, I got fed up with it. I met my girlfriend, and then had a very bad time in January 2005. I started walking around Haarlem. Actually, the first poem in that section, "van rookkokers en pandaken," I wrote walking the Warmoesstraat in Haarlem not far from here. I had some kind of epiphany, a revelation about my poetry, that what I had been doing was bullshit. I was reading a lot of other poetry. I had to change something, and it hit me: I am going to do it this way. This poem is the first poem of all those in the book, the one in which I following up on my restructured poetics.

So this is a very important poem. At first, my book was supposed to be called "van rookkokers en pandaken," but that's too much. So "aan de grens" also means at the borders of what I want to happen in my poetry, in my book. It was the center where it all happened. In due time, it got pushed to the edge of what I wanted to have in my book, but sometimes now and then I keep coming back to this kind of poetry. It's very rhythmic. It has a lot of images.

F: This whole section seems to function that way.

H: Exactly. And you could say you could take it out, it has no direct connection to the theme, so that's why it's in the middle of the book.

F: Where do you think you draw your poetic influences? We discussed music a bit earlier and your playing the piano, which I didn't know, but are there poets you draw upon? Is there a tradition you feel connected to?

H: I read so many books a week, three or four. I used to read only what I like and now I started reading what I don't like, trying to figure out why I don't like it. I'm trying to figure out what makes people tick, why they do it the way they do it.

One poet is Gerrit Kouwenaar. He's an old man now, but he's from the fifties. What the Beats were in the U.S. in Holland we had the Vijftigers, the Fiftiers, or movement from Fifty, the COBRA art school. I think he still is the biggest poet we ever had in the 20th century.

He is able to write a poem that is so completely out of time, a poem that seems to stop the clock, a bite out of time. It's very abstract probably, but in his poems, there is no space and no time. There's a bubble. He does it with such ease, over and over again. It doesn't get boring. I haven't read one bad poem. There are better and not so bad, but never a bad poem. He struck me as - it's not easily accessible, it's abstract, and has an anti-rhythm in it. I read it and feel not here anymore, as if time stops.

Another poet is Erik Jan Harmens. What he does, no one's even done before, and I like people who do something that wasn't there originally, a completely new thing. He heard me perform a number of times and helped me a lot. He's very critical and honest, outspoken. His poetry itself is like a knock in the teeth, it knocks you down. It's very difficult poetry. His book Underperformer is about his son who is autistic and his father dying in a very bad way. He writes about it in such a rough way, using words that you would not think he could use, and it's very emotional. He really struck me and has been a kind of a role model. He does what he wants to do, and doesn't care what others say. It's his way or no way. I think there's a lot of poetry being written now because it sells well. I read too many poets who are not honest in what they do, describing a cat on the table in the garden . . . who gives a shit? It's nice that they can write it in that way, but is it useful, does it have a purpose? I think some poetry has to have a purpose.

F: We discussed the other day that poetry has to risk something.

H: Yes, risk. Harmens' risk factor is all the way, there's no holding back. And that's what I tried to get out of my system and to do in familie gebiedt. The way I was brought up I was told you have to be very careful, but who cares? You have to give it all and be honest in what you write.

I had a discussion with a good friend of mine, a really good poet, he says there are a lot of people who simply write anything and when someone poses a question they respond "Well, figure it out yourself, I don't know what I just did" - it's arty-farty. I hate that. If people ask you about your poetry, you have to be able to explain what you did, not word for word, but the essence or the necessity. You're almost obliged to do so.

F: Tell me about your reading of the Beat poets. I know reading them was part of your formal education, but also a real energizing experience for you - to think about the Beat poets, the Beat culture in the U.S. and its comparable generation here in the Netherlands.

H: That's what my thesis was about: the comparison between the Vijftigers and the Beats. They were both not so much schools of poetry, but friends who were born in the same era who wanted to do something different. I read On the Road when I was sixteen. That's the best time to read it, fifteen or sixteen. If I reread it, I'm sure there are things I could be critical about.

They met in Amsterdam, some of the Beats, Corso and Ginsberg for a while, were living here. The huge difference, the Beat generation was living in a country after WWII that was so wealthy, so rich, and they withdrew from a society that was bourgeois. They said we don't want the house and the picket fence, we don't want who the government wants us to be, so we're going to be drop-outs. They chose to be drop-outs.

And the problem in the Netherlands after WWII was the country was in ruins, there was no economy, there was poverty and a feeling that we had to rebuild this country, so everyone was alike and working. It was a very gray, family-oriented era. And all of the most important poets in the Netherlands before WWII died or committed suicide, so there was no poetic school left. In the US, they rebelled against the poets of the previous generation. Walt Whitman was their inspiration, but they rebelled to other poetry. But in the Netherlands, there were no schools; they all died. So the poets here rebelled against the greyness or common day feeling of everyday life. Others said you should not be concerned with art. We have to rebuild this country, feed each other, build houses; that's important right now. It's hard to explain. The Beats were in a kind of luxury position. They could say Fuck all the originals and I don't give a shit. And we didn't have any money in this country.

F: Or if not richness, bourgeois, middle class America, a modest, but very comfortable way of living at the time. I think middle class in America these days is a little more privileged, while in the fifties middle class meant comfort not privilege. And I think you're right that the Beats were recoiling from that, but also the obligations that come along with that - your book similarly talks about family and its obligations - the house, the yard, the steady job. The Beats didn't want it.

H: Yes, we didn't have that here; we were rebuilding the country. There was no art scene, so they had to invent it. There was no avant-garde in this country - we stepped over that period. We didn't have it here as it was in the rest of Europe with the Dada-ists and such. The Vijftigers had a lot of influence from the French writers. We had nothing to rebel against. Well, there was, but it was a simple life of rebuilding this country.

The Beats had more of a lifestyle too. The Vijftigers did not have a lifestyle. It was a very artistic-driven way of writing. The Beats did whatever they wanted. If you look at all the different Beats, the work they produce is very different from each other. So the lifestyle was the common link: smoking weed, being gay maybe, . . .

F: Also moving about. If you look at On the Road it's very much a chronicle of travel, of moving place to place. You and I have spoken about Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie and the way in which the landscape of America, the sheer size of it and the road-oriented (as opposed to the railroad) mode of travel lends itself to that kind of private, long distance wandering.

H: Right. I can see what the Dutch writers meant for poetry in this country, but to be honest . . . I just picked up a book called Legitimate Dangers, modern 20th century poetry, and spoke with others about the Bay poets. The U.S. is so big and there are a lot of things going on, different schools of poets. In the Netherlands, it's the same thing, but a much smaller scale. There are not enough poets here who go out and bust their heads. So many of the poets who win the prizes in this country, it's good poetry I know, but it's very safe, it's not very astonishing or mind-blowing. It doesn't get me hot or cold.

The problem is cultural too -- in this country, if you stick your head above the grain field, you have it chopped off. You're encouraged to take it easy -- it's very DutcH: act normal, because if you're normal you're crazy enough already. Je hoofd boven het maaiveld steken.

I'm a little rebellious, but my poetry is not that daring at all. I try to stretch my limits, struggle with myself, don't take it easy. I feel a lot of poets in the Netherlands take it easy and write a lot of easy poetry, small-talk poetry. Poets should start a rebellion in themselves, don't fight fellow poets, but fight yourself in what you do. The people I admire do that -- getting better and better and deeper and deeper. I used to read poetry on the train I rode for fifty minutes to a former job, and if I was struck by a poet, I'd wonder why and how, how can it make me itch or laugh? Poets have to trigger me, blow my mind. There are not a lot of poets who do that in the Netherlands. For whom do you write? Do you write for yourself? Is it a necessity that you write, or do you do it to please people? Well, some write to please people.

F: The risk that you're talking about isn't necessarily cultural -- it's a function of the individual. Naturally people work within cultural systems (and what those particular systems expect of them), but the decision to risk is probably individual. The kinds of people willing to risk, willing to take chances and ask really hard questions and do the hard work trying to answer those questions for themselves -- those people are rare, I think, in any culture.

H: I can speak for my own culture. I don't know about the U.S. -- there's so much poetry there and it's hard to know completely at any one point. That's probably why I don't write in English. People ask why, but I'm still trying to sort out how Dutch works. I'm still struggling with Dutch, so why write in English if I can't figure out my own language? You can translate it -- that's ok, but I'm not going to write in it. I haven't mastered my own language yet. Maybe I will never manage to master it. And so I read poets whose work blows my mind, and I try to figure out what they do, how they do it. They make me think about myself, the world around me, about life. And if you can do that, you're a good poet. There are not that many. I think that's a good thing.

If I did this interview tomorrow, I would have basically the same thoughts, the same poetics, but things would probably come out a totally different way. That's the way poetry works. I create my own universe, but in five minutes it might shift a little bit, not change, but shift.