When he was 14 years old, Dutch poet Erik Lindner made a rather extraordinary decision. He dropped out of school and decided to spend a life immersed in poetry. “Since I lived with my father and he was self-trained too, it was easy,” he says. Though he admits he “missed some theory,” it helped him develop more fully as a poet as he “tried to read a lot to make up.”
Poetry had already become a vital part of his life by then. He wrote his first poem around this time, and by 16, had started performing. “My first reading was a bit of a secret; it happened in a bar at The Hague one Sunday afternoon,” he says.
By 1986 — he was around 18 then — he could live off poetry, he says. “I would do multiple readings and get paid for every one of them,” remembers Lindner, who collaborated with local musicians, performing all through the country, “into Belgium, in youth centres, in theatres. The mid-80s were poetry times.”
From performer to writer
It took him around 12 years to release his first book of poetry, however: Tramontane came out in 1996. “People started telling me that my poetry was a bit too serious for performance. You need to be more funny or dramatic with that, I think. So I began working more and more on text,” says the 49-year-old, whose poetry, according to poet Jan Baeke, “in its seeming triviality brings to light all sorts of wonderful, intangible facts.”
There is an almost nomadic flavour to his work, the verse of an artiste traipsing through the world, using language to dredge out its minutest details. He trains his lens on cities and seas, on apples and blood, chronicling the movement and the almost insidious magic of the mundane.
Take, for instance, his poem about a man eating an apple in the park. Lindner talks not just about the biting of “a chunk from the apple/ and let it topple onto his tongue”, but also the park in which he eats, where, “the pond shrinks behind the bushes,” and “animal climbs up a trunk/and springs and sprints through the field.” In another poem, as a window “opens a crack,” he mentions what one can see in its light: “crumbs paper-clips,” and “the cardboard wedge that keeps the table straight and the window open.”
A world of poetry
Nature, travel, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, illusions: there is a sense of all of this and more when one skims through his work, that often reflects the detachment of a rank outsider. He admits as much, “The idea of being outside, the sense of being a passenger. I derive that from walking, seeing and capturing the small details,” he says.
Since he travels so frequently and started at a very young age — “I hitch-hiked to Paris just after I dropped out of school” — details culled from all over the world are reflected in his writing. The streets of Berlin, the cityscapes of Taipei, the sea of Piraeus, the mountains of Scotland have all been influences.
“Poetry has a different place in every country. It is not just the poetry that is different, but the way it is presented and how it reaches out to people,” says the author of six books: five poetry and one fictional prose. He contrasts, for instance, the way poetry is treated in Holland “like cabaret”, vis a vis Germany, where it is taken seriously. “And you know, Germany and Holland are neighbours,” he says.
“I have been so long in poetry that if I didn’t go to other countries and explore other disciplines, I would get bored,” he says, adding that influences from other art forms also constantly feed into his work.
That is perhaps why, in addition to his ongoing projects, he hopes to release a book of essays that talk about his travels with verse. “One chapter for every country I have visited... to show Holland that what they think is poetry is only one way of poetry.”
