Stefan Hertmans: 'Poetry is my way of digesting the world'

Flemish author Stefan Hertmans (1951) is best known in the Netherlands as a novelist, especially since he came out with the wonderful autobiographical novel War and turpentine won the AKO Literature Prize and the Gouden Boekenuil Publieksprijs. But besides being a writer of novels, collections of short stories, essays and theatre texts, Hertmans is above all a poet. He wrote the Poetry Gift for the upcoming Poetry Week, which starts at the end of January. "Poetry has been almost constantly present in my life as an undertone.

Like so many people, Hertmans started writing poetry as an adolescent. Fourteen he was. He laughs at the memory. 'Everyone writes poetry when they are adolescents, but sensible people stop doing that. Naive people carry on. And then you have to get so good that those sensible people eventually respect you again.'

So Hertmans became that, in almost every other literary genre. He made his debut in 1981 with the novel Space, followed three years later by his first book of poetry, Breath column. Since then, he has built up an impressive oeuvre consisting of novels, collections of poems and short stories, theatre texts and essays on literature and art. He has received several awards and nominations in all genres. Almost half of his publications consist of collections of poetry, although the most recent one dates, The fall of free days, already from 2010. The Poetry Gift, which like Poetry Week is dedicated to memory - a theme that recurs frequently in Hertmans' oeuvre - is thus the first collection in five years.

Hertmans' poems are rich in cultural references. This is why he used to be called a 'toppled bookcase'. But sitting in his study, the walls covered with bookcases in which all the great writers of the world are represented, listening to the soft, Flemish accent, the thoughtful diction with which he intersperses his erudite discourse with quotations from philosophers and writers, you gradually discover something else: with his whole being he is one big sound box in which all that knowledge, beauty and sensitivity resonates. It is not what Stefan Hertmans does or pretends to be, it is who he deeply is: a man who breathes literature.

I read that being asked to write the Poetry Gift made you feel called to order to finally start writing poetry again. What did you mean by that?

''Poetry writing was almost constantly present as an undertone in my life for the past 30 years. I could write poetry in between all the other work. It is the core business for me, because this is where you have to focus the most: on your tone, on your style, on the way you tell something, even on your outlook on life and the way you face the world. Due to the success of War and turpentine I was barely at home - I drove 45,000 kilometres by car for readings in one year. I noticed the flow drying up, thought poetry had left me because I was too busy. I spent two-and-a-half years, no, laner, three years almost not writing poetry. Poetry is such a complex process between your intuition and your vision, your emotions and your thinking, between what happens in your brain and in your mind. Prose and essays, I can relate to that. But for a poem, especially the first one geut, I have to be in a certain state mentally and physically. I can't conduct that.''

So certain mood is required, but at the same time it goes everywhere in between.

''Yes. I don't like mystical definitions of inspiration, but if you look at it psychologically and medically, there is a certain state - every poet knows that. It can happen to me in the tram, in the car, anywhere, and then I put everything aside for it. It's like pulling one thread out of a pullover. You have to pull that all the way out, very carefully - one moment of lapse of concentration makes it snap. That's a 20-minute process, and then that first draft on it. If the phone rings, it's messed up.

So now I felt like I hadn't written any poetry for three years. But when I had to pick an unpublished poem for the Night of Poetry, I opened my 'new poems' folder and there turned out to be 60 in there. Very interesting: it says something about the organic way that goes on inside me, even when I feel it's not there.

Paul van Ostaijen once said: a good poem needs a year's cellar. With me, it can quietly have four years of cellar. Let it ripen quietly there. Then I pick it up again to file on it, to edit it, to put poems in a certain order, to find the concept that is intuitive in it. When working on a collection, the question is: what do you really want to tell yourself with these poems? And how do you emphasise and structure that? I put those sixty pages on the floor and walk through them. And then I shift: that there, and that there. Poems change meaning by the order in which you put them.

There is an upcoming publication of my poems on love, so recently I went through all my verses on that subject. That went very quickly: in three days I was through them. That poem did, that one didn't, they should be in that order. From that emerged a vision of love that is intimate, passionate and dark. Surprising; I myself thought I had a much lighter view of love. But in the lighter moments, I don't write about it, or rarely. Now I am suddenly reminded of a phrase by German philosopher Adorno: "It is the darkness in poems that attracts us." This is true. Because they say something about the area inside us where much is active and present and over which we have little control. That fascinates me. It's about your humanity.''

Of all literary forms, does poetry touch the essence the most, do you think?

''Absolutely. It is strange to say that in our time, because for one and a half or two centuries the novel has been the dominant genre in literature. Poetry has gradually declined in importance; nowadays, poets are considered just an unworldly amateur club. Literary poetry requires the most skill; it is the literary text at its sharpest. And those who can read poetry can read anything in literature. The reverse is not true; those who can read novels well cannot necessarily read poetry well.

Poetry is the thing that surprises me the most and teaches me the most about myself. It is also the genre in which, as a writer, I most often reach a point where I think: do I dare to do that? Is that really me? Is that who I want to be in this poem? Seen in that light, I think my successive collections form a nice biography.

There have been all kinds of studies published that show literature would make you more empathetic. I wouldn't have taught for 40 years if I didn't believe that. Immanuel Kant said, "To be enlightened means to develop the ability to think for yourself." I have always linked that to my ideology about literature. I can't count the times I was told as a young author that I was a wayward author. But what kind of sensible author should I be apart from quirky? It's about learning to think for yourself. Literature allows you to get to yourself through a diversion.

We often associate emotions with being close to yourself, but I personally think that emotions actually often alienate you from yourself. Your inner self is like a pond and the waves can go high into it; you have to wait until the intense emotions have disappeared and the mirror is smooth again to be able to look into it. Only then can you mercilessly perceive who you really are. For me, poetry is actually a kind of yoga of the mind to achieve that.''

Your poems are full of references to mythology, philosophy and art. Is that all in that first draft right away?

''Yes. In Cinnamon Fingers there is a poem called 'Piero's hands'. This is not because I want to write such an interesting poem about the painter Piero della Francesca, but because I think: those hands by Piero, how often they have moved me. And that girl has hands like those in one of those paintings. That's the beauty of life, knowing such things. My poems are the result of my life. What I think about style and form is a second. And ideally, they come together. Then you write a draft like that where you think: now I did it. I have such a poem - I won't say which one - written shivering with cold, somewhere four thousand kilometres from here, on a beach in an empty house, looking out over the sea. Not a comma changed. Those are the best moments. And if all goes well, the reader has them too.''

Does it matter if readers miss much of the content or if they don't understand it?

''No, in the 16th century it didn't matter either. Paintings from that era are full of jokes for people who can see them. Art plays with the things that are there, that's its job. If it allows itself to put prohibition marks in it, you get terribly mediocre art.

Of course there are those who feel left out by this. Why is this poet writing about something I don't know? He is a toppled bookcase. Pedantic! Especially in the past, I have so often been told that I was acting up. You get accused because you know things others don't. Quentin Tarantino's films contain allusions to James Joyce's work. Is it Tarantino's fault if people don't recognise them?

Had I not read all those poets - Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Auden, George Trakl, Paul Celan, Hölderlin, Borges - I could never have done what I do. You have to learn from your predecessors. We have a very wrong idea of originality in today's time. Your originality and your imitation ability are related. Many people think originality is giving in to your emotions. Just be spontaneous! But that mostly produces clichés. Look first at what has been made in previous centuries. Learn, imitate. After that, maybe you can do something original.''

How lonely is it to be a poet in this day and age?

''On the contrary, I would be lonely if I stopped writing poetry. It is a way of being for me, my way of digesting the world. Very few people look only at the story anymore, not at the beauty below, above and behind the story. The poet is all about that very thing. In a film by a bad director, you see characters doing all sorts of things, and then they literally do those things. In a good film, the mere expression of a cigarette in an ashtray can fill you with incredible melancholy or thought. That is the art. As a poet, you seek the boundary between what you can say with words and what you can evoke with them. A reviewer once said that I wrote my poems with invisible ink, and that if you read carefully, that invisible ink comes out. It is one of the best compliments I have ever received.

I was writing poetry before I knew what it was. There is a side to it that I don't understand or can't name. In that, I have now been called back to order: Go back to that which you don't know yourself.''

During Poetry Week (28 January to 3 February), anyone who spends at least €12.50 on poetry will receive the Poetry Gift Take and Read by Stefan Hertmans as a gift. January will also see the publication of a new collection by Hertmans, Een beeld van jou, with his personal selection of his love poems.