Piet Piryns: 'TivoliVredenburg is main character of The Night of Poetry'

It has been eagerly awaited for weeks: the Night of Poetry. For the thirty-fourth time next month, poets and audience gather around the stage for a night of verses and music. Regular presenter Piet Piryns, now fused with the event, looks back and ahead.

He remembers it well, his first Night. Belgian journalist and writer Piet Piryns, by now a familiar face for years, presented The Night of Poetry for the first time, together with Geertjan Lubberhuizen. It was 1984, and the Night experienced its fourth edition in Utrecht. 'It was a rather memorable evening. I well remember the controversy surrounding Willem Frederik Hermans. He had just visited South Africa, where Apartheid still ruled at the time. His planned appearance elicited threats and protests from the Surinamese poet Julian With, who was ready to go to blows with Hermans. It sparked a scandal. Hermans eventually pulled out. That scandal overshadowed The Night.'

Total chaos

By the way, compared to the Night of Poetry in Brussels, from which the Utrecht initiative was derived, that riot was quite mild, laughs Piryns. 'In Brussels it degenerated into total chaos: people were not paid, drunken poets tumbled off the stage, the strongest man in Ghent performed - the event was actually more like a circus than an evening of poetry. In Flanders, the Night had died a quiet death. But because of the reputation of the Brussels version, at the first Dutch editions some poets were averse to coming.'

'Someone with whom it took a long time to be persuaded was Lucebert, for example. Anneke van Dijk, the 'Mother of the Night', had to work very hard for that. Lucebert's performance was very special. After all, he is not the most accessible poet and he did not write anecdotal poetry, to put it mildly. He stood there reciting like the Greek orator Demosthenes. Those are unforgettable moments.'

Enchantress

Hugo Claus, Rutger Kopland, Antjie Krog, Hans Faverey, Gerrit Kouwenaar - all the greats have performed at the Night of Poetry. Fritzi Harmsen van Beek came once and, stiff with nerves and booze, stood on stage like some kind of sorceress. Remco Campert said a stirring goodbye to his audience there, and Annie M.G. Schmidt, who was already almost blind, read aloud with a special viewer on her glasses. 'You might wonder whether you were doing some people a favour,' Piryns hesitates. 'There are poets who don't get anywhere on a stage. Claus or Kopland could read a phone book, so to speak, and it would still be beautiful, but others have no business on that stage, really.'

The Night of Poetry always offers a mix of established poets and new talent. Upcoming speakers include Charles Ducal, who was Poet Laureate of the Netherlands in Belgium, Anna Enquist, Joke van Leeuwen and Charlotte Van den Broeck, the Flemish poet who closed last year's event and who, according to tradition, will be the first to take the stage this year. On average, writers are not allowed to perform more often than once every three years, and although there is no pharmacy scale involved, some attention is paid to ensuring that the stage is not only male and that Flemish poetry is also featured. 'Furthermore, we look at the alternation between allegro and andante. Laughter is allowed. Someone like Jules Deelder, for instance, is not a top poet, but he is great to watch. But they don't all have to be stage tigers.

Skirmishes

The Night of Poetry has always cared little for dominant movements or, as Piryns calls it, the poetic Hook and Codswallop squabbles of the 'poetry police': critics who have a very clear definition of what is or is not good poetry. Nor does the event have the function of a laboratory. Yet you can see period images in the broad programming. 'For instance, we had the Maximals on stage, and the New Wilden, around Elly de Waard, and later all kinds of postmodern stuff that you don't hear about now either.'

Skirmishes between poets occasionally take place in the foyer, the presenter continues. 'But I have only experienced one incident on stage, in the mid-1990s, when Serge van Duijnhoven and Olaf Zwetsloot jumped on stage and started chanting, "We want the young poets!" You see, they had calculated that the average age of the poets performing was 53 or something like that. They only wanted their own generation. Well, you have to give them a break then.'

Duelling

They used to take into account who liked a drink - some were better not to be programmed after eleven o'clock, as there was a good chance they would be drunk. With translator August Willemsen or poet Jean Pierre Rawie, for example, it was often touch and go. Piryns recalls one Night when both were present. 'The old August had just been dry for a while and went on a binge that night, while Jean Pierre kept shouting: 'Shall we duel! Choose your weapons, choose your seconds!" It was always fun behind the scenes.' Remco Campert and Gerrit Kouwenaar also got into an argument once after consuming the necessary bottles of red wine. 'They were both already very old, Campert 75 I think, and Kouwenaar was 80, who was reproaching Campert: "You're a lazy bugger, with your pieces in de Volkskrant. You need to get back to work and write a poem!'

Early to bed

But you don't have to be in Utrecht these days for drunken poets, Piryns sighs. 'People drink a lot less than they used to, which is a sign of the times. Poets also want to go to bed early these days. Last year, Jules Deelder did not want to perform later than eleven o'clock. And there are more like that. Come on, we just can't seat everyone between eight and nine o'clock. What a silly mess, you think.'

Well, poets get older too. And die. 'How lucky that Wim Brands still performed in 2014 and reported last year. And Rogi Wieg insisted on appearing at the Night last year with a reading, which we recorded at his home earlier because he knew he wasn't going to make it because he was going to end his life. We also wanted to ask Zwagerman, but he preferred to wait another year, because he could then present his new collection. Afterwards, you think: shit. Too much is dying. Poetry itself has very often been declared dead. I don't think poetry is dying, but poets are. And how.'

Red Box

While the average poetry collection achieves a circulation of a few hundred copies, the Night of Poetry has sold out weeks in advance for almost all 34 years. Two thousand people listen to poetry and music (the entr'actes) until the small hours and defy sleep. If, after the fifth Night, the organisers were still wondering whether to stop, they now know that there is a lot of new attendance and choice every year. And then there are also many poets who present themselves every year, Piryns notes dryly. 'You get a lot of whining from all kinds of people who think it is finally their turn to be on the Night. But kids who ask get passed over.'

During the period when Vredenburg was being rebuilt into the current Tivoli-Vredenburg, the Night seemed almost done with. In the so-called 'Red Box', a temporary concert hall in Leidsche Rijn, the concept turned out not to work at all. Visitors could not easily walk in and out - a requirement during such a long evening -, there was not that atmosphere of Vredenburg's main hall, where after so many years poetry had seeped into the stones and wood. 'In a way, the hall designed by architect Herman Hertzberger is the main character of the Night of Poetry. Thank God they kept it.'

Ingmar Heytze and Vrouwkje Tuinman

In those Vredenburg-less days, Piet Piryns and his then co-presenter Menno Wigman said goodbye - they did not like the new form - and it was decided that everything had to change: the concept was too old-fashioned, it had to be more dynamic and multidisciplinary. As for Piryns, it is thanks to Ingmar Heytze and Vrouwkje Tuinman, who championed the Night of Poetry, that the event survived. Eventually, it was able to return to that special hall in Vredenburg, the only hall where this fest can take place. 'Then The Night rose from the ashes like a phoenix.'

With that, Piryns also returned to the stage, and the ideas of pimping up the concept were thrown overboard. After all, in football you don't suddenly put six men in the striker's box either. The formula is good the way it is, and listening to poets on stage really adds to the experience of poetry. 'It has regularly happened to me myself that poems that did nothing for me on paper suddenly became much clearer to me when I heard the poet's voice with them,' Piryns said. 'When I read Leonard Nolens' poetry, inwardly I always hear his voice. The crazy thing is: if you have those same poems recited by an actor, it's nothing more. We tried that once, but it didn't work. The poet's voice is like his handwriting.'