Frans Budé: 'A poem has to have a story'

In his recent collection Achter het verdwijnpunt, death plays an important role. Poet Frans Budé lost no fewer than four poet friends in a short time and honoured them in verse. The 70-year-old poet himself still writes as avidly as in his younger years: in addition to an occasional collection about the Meuse, which will be published in May, he wrote poems for the upcoming exhibition Coming Home at the Museum aan het Vrijthof and his first novel will be published this summer. Portrait of an inspired poet.

Two collections by Frans Budé will appear this spring, and both have to do with his hometown. In the second and third weekends of May, the landscape opera 'De Grensmaas vertelt' will take place, a musical-theatrical journey that aims to make the present, past and future of the landscape audible. On the occasion, Frans Budé will publish the collection In het stroomgebied van de Maas, with verses on the different atmospheres of this river. And in June, the Museum aan het Vrijthof will dedicate the exhibition Coming home to travel sketches by visual artist Chrit Rousseau, including thirty poems by Budé.

But even though he has lived in the student city of Limburg all his life and loves that place and its landscape, please do not call him a 'Maastricht' or 'Limburg' poet. Such an adjective makes Frans Budé (1945) shiver - it quickly acquires a derogatory connotation, as if it were inferior, provincial perhaps. 'A reviewer called my previous collection Transit "very Limburgish". That annoys me. The poems are set in twenty-one countries! But no, it was as Limburgish as it could be.'

However, Budé's poetry is rooted in Maastricht in another way, namely in the liveliness and encounter between different countries and cultures that characterise the city. As a child, Frans Budé used to sit with his parents on Friday and Saturday evenings behind the large shop windows of their drugstore in the city centre, watching the city bustle outside. The people on the street could not see them, they could see the people on the street - that was their television in those days. Little Frans saw prostitutes on the street, drunk people, fights and rows. And at lunchtime he stood, three peas high, hidden behind the counter; then he would hear the latest gossip passing by the till, at the same time as the Brylcreem or packs of sanitary towels. 'That's how I got to know the world, that defined my outlook. As a result, there is also a certain committedness in my work.'

Behind the vanishing point is Frans Budé's thirteenth collection of poetry since he debuted in 1968. In the collection, we encounter familiar themes such as the solace of nature, transience, loss, war and death. Those unfamiliar with his work might now think it is melancholy poetry, but that is not the case - at most, a little wistful at times. Yet death is more emphatically present in this collection than before.

You recently turned seventy. Not surprisingly, death plays a more emphatic role in life: more and more poets and writers of your generation are being lost.

' 'That's right, in two years I buried four colleagues. In this volume, I commemorate Hans Groenewegen, H.H. ter Balkt, Hans van de Waarsenburg and Gerrit Kouwenaar. I knew them well; Hans Groenewegen and Hans van de Waarsenburg in particular were real companions. But I also had a pleasant contact with Harry ter Balkt and Gerrit Kouwenaar. With fellow poets you sometimes shared more than with other friends; you shared the troubles of the book trade, you travelled and read together'. '

 Yet impermanence and death have always been important themes in your work. Where does this fascination come from?

' 'I think it's because I was confronted with death at an early age. When I was almost four and would go to kindergarten, my mother said: look behind the door of the dresser cabinet, there's a surprise for you. But instead of the door, I pulled open a drawer. On top of a pile of souvenirs, I saw a photo. Huh? What's that? A baby among flowers in a small coffin? I felt there was something about it; I was a sensitive child and slept badly. Why did that baby have black nails? So the next day I asked about it. It turned out to be my late sister, who was born before me and had lived for a day at most. She must have died of something like cot death or something, but my parents were always secretive about it. My father said that a German bomb had fallen right behind our house that day and that its air pressure had damaged her little brain. It didn't - that bomb fell about six weeks later. Apparently he needed such a story to give his grief meaning.' '

 That first experience of death probably made a deep impression on that little boy?

' 'Yes, and that was not the only one. When I was about 11 years old, I was standing by the street with a schoolmate waiting for his father to come and pick him up. A cement truck arrived, one of those huge 12-wheeled trucks. That father calls his son, crosses over and we see him completely crushed between the wheels before our eyes. It was terrible, one big gunk - I see it all over again now. Again later, I saw the district nurse on her solex being hit by a lemon van, seriously injuring her head. Things like that stick with you.

Yet it is not so much death that fascinates me the most, as leaving behind and being left behind. The sense of loss. My father lost his father when he was only five years old; my grandfather was head conductor on the train between Maastricht and Liège, and fell out of the moving train while trying to close the harmonica doors, which had burst open. I also grew up hearing my parents' stories about the Second and First World Wars. According to the history books, World War I passed us by, but a million Belgians fled to the Netherlands. Maastricht had six border crossings and refugees arrived from all sides. I can still hear my mother telling it. As a girl, she could see the town of Visé, just across the border, burning from the station tower. Every time she told me that, she cried.' '

The poem as a story

At Behind the vanishing point Budé pays tribute not only to his dead poet friends, but also to poets and writers who were wounded or killed as soldiers during World War I and to great artists such as James Ensor, Armando and Frida Kahlo.

 You always write in cycles, in series of poems. What does that form offer you?

' 'I am one of the few who writes in sections. I'm not like: poem about a still life; well, next poem about winter light; next poem. That gets too anecdotal for me. For me, it has to have a story, almost something novel-like. If I get hold of something, a subject, I get totally absorbed in it. In June, I was in Paris at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and visited an exhibition by Markus Lüpertz. As we entered there, I saw a bronze sculpture of a man in a boat. That inspired me; it evoked a story of a man searching for his lost lover, the Orpheus motif. I already have the working title: The journey. I leave my associations free, but I do try to touch the person in poems like about Ensor or Armando.' '

In your collection, you dedicated an In Memoriam to Gerrit Kouwenaar, a poet with whom you may have been compared ad nauseam, as if your work did not stand alone. Does that bother you?

' 'Before, more than now. Someone once said, "Budé always uses the words 'one' and 'himself', and so does Kouwenaar." I have even been called - like a few colleagues - a Kouwenaar epigone, although this has been refuted several times by critics like Gerbrandy and Molin. I think I was influenced much more by Paul Celan and Georg Trakl or Gerrit Achterberg than by Kouwenaar. Only much later did I start reading the work of Kouwenaar and Faverey. Also, the idea that my work would be so hermetic lived a life of its own for too long.' '

 Looking back on almost half a century of poetry, what development do you see in your oeuvre?

' 'Clearly, I did not opt for the anecdotal, which was so present in Dutch literature at the time. I wanted something different, set myself against it. I was looking more in the German direction. But gradually I freed myself from that and broke through that closedness. I went out more, literally and figuratively. I started travelling more, especially through Europe, and writing a lot about it. Many countries I visit only in my imagination; I travel with Google Maps. Then I walk down a random street. I was doing that the other day, somewhere in the United States, and then I saw a man facing a woman, with his fist raised. I then start doing something with an image like that.' '

You may be called a 'Maastricht' poet, but your work is very international in scope.

' 'Yes, and therein indeed lies an influence of my hometown. Maastricht lies between Germany and Belgium, and besides that, twelve thousand students live here, so in the streets you hear all these different languages. I love that! When I walk behind a bunch of foreign students, I often notice that I slow down - to go along with the younger flow, so to speak.

I enjoy reading poets like H.C. ten Berge, Anneke Brassinga, Lucas Hüsgen, Tonnus Oosterhoff and Cees Nooteboom. In them, I recognise the way they look at the world. But I also enjoy reading young poets, such as Tsead Bruinja, Lieke Marsman, Rozalie Hirs and Bernke Klein Zandvoort, to name but a few. I love seeing how they, for instance, deal with loss in turn. I'm not a grumbling writer who doesn't like the younger generation.' '