free to

Poetry Week, that's it too, or is it already over? Since most of that week didn't happen anyway, it doesn't really matter. Well, we have a new Poet Laureate, the wonderful Lieke Marsman. Many cities have a new city poet. These are appointments that range from 'it's about damn time,' as in the case of Anne Vegter for Rotterdam to 'Who? Who do you say?" and sometimes "What, where is that? Does that have city rights?'

Personally, my thoughts this week go to the Bernhezer Kunstkring. The latter has used a poem of mine on a semi-permanent banner standing somewhere on a square in the Brabant town of Heesch. I know this because pictures of it appeared in the newspaper.

I have not been asked anything. I don't have to, because it is marked 'free after Ingmar Heytze', and then it is allowed. I do it myself, in all my free translations of English and American poems, so I am the last one who should whine about that.

I may think something of it, and that is this: it is wise that they did not ask me anything. The free editing was done by someone who undoubtedly has many and great artistic talents, but not for poetry.

It schmaltzes. It rattles. It is set in Brabant. And my name is below it, with 'free to' as a sham in front of it. The poem is unsigned, so who raped my work I don't know. I reported on the Bernhezer Kunstkring's contact page a month ago. No response. Dead silence. I dare not email again. You never know what people are like these days.

Goddamn, how cranky this literary healing is making me. But I can also see that there are purely good and kind intentions behind it, so I have nowhere to go with that crankiness. I mutter it to myself and stir it into my coffee. There is nothing else to do. Just like with those hundreds of churches that now hang full of 'keep courage, love' - another line of poetry pulled out of my hands by a darling lady who didn't know it was mine.

And it may not really be anymore. As the days dissolve into each other, the normal rhythm into a kind of life fog and my income into lockdown, my work dissolves into the world. The longer it goes on, the less it matters. To be in lockdown is to exist, free to 'live'.