 |
 |
|
|
The Poetry of Rutger Kopland
A World Beyond Myself’, Enitharmon, 1991 £7.95 pbk
Memories of the Unknown’, Harvill Press, 2001 £10.00 hbk
By Michael Murray
Part 1: Beginnings
In 1996, New York’s Vintage Press brought out ‘The Vintage Book of World Poetry’; the book settled many reputations, but also introduced many more.
The Dutch writer Rutger Kopland woke up one morning to find himself a world-class poet.
We are very lucky to have the masterful translations of the late James Brockway. He preferred the description of ‘collaborations’, it reflected more the close work with the author to render as near a syllabic and tonal copy as possible.
“…what I am presenting,” he wrote, “…is a Dutch poem by a Dutch mind, but now in the English language”.
James Brockway was made ‘Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands’ in 1997, for his services to Dutch literature. James Brockway died in 2000.
‘Rutger Kopland’ is the pen name of Professor of Psychiatry (retired) Rudi H van den Hoofdakker. He was born in 1934, and has won many prestigious prizes, one of which is the Dutch highest award for literary achievement, the P C Hooft Prize.
Kopland’s first book, ‘Among Cattle’, appeared in 1966. The date is important in a number of ways. In the nineteen fifties Dutch art woke up to experiment; it was a time of cataclysmic experiment in all forms, only paralleled in Dutch poetry by the exuberance of the medieval Rederijker rhetorical guilds.
Of course, as with many such movements, they also carry and help generate the seeds of their successors. Out of the foment of imagistic, lexical experiment a strong realistic note was beginning to be detectable.
Kopland, along with Judith Herzberg are now readily identified as the best representatives of this tone: of a sane, nonrhetorical, everyday language and subject matter.
In this first book are to be found all the tonal keys of his later work. An instant favourite was the first poem of the book, ‘A Psalm’, now a much anthologised piece:
A Psalm
The green pastures the still waters
on the wallpaper in my room –
as a frightened child I believed
in wall paper
when my mother had said prayers for me
and I had forgiven for one day more
I was left behind among
motionless horse and cattle,
a foundling laid in a world
of grass
now that once again I have to go
through god’s pastures I find no path
to take me back, only a small hand
clasped in mine that tightens
when the enormous bodies
of the cattle grunt and snuffle
with peace.
The first thing to notice here is the almost total lack of punctuation. In the original there is only the final full stop, even the commas, lines 8 and 14, do not appear.
We catch the tone of slow, almost ruminative… can we call it ‘thinking aloud’? Are we overhearing a sotto voce between intimate friends? Husband and wife, perhaps, or is it between father and child, as maybe becomes apparent in the last stanza? I wonder, does it matter: the drama of a listening audience is of less importance, than the manner and intent of the narration.
Also notice the slow accumulation of details that reveal but not reveal the narration: what was it he had, or had been, forgiven? The biblical references (note lowercase ‘god’) and Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd…”) set a tone, particularly in the traditionally Calvinist/Lutheran Netherlands, for solitary meditative discourse, whose heavy and responsible purpose: to converse with God, without intercessors, is offset by the witty, chatty aside: ‘as a … child I believed in wall paper…’.
Psalm 23 becomes a constant reference point in his writing.
The setting of the poem: the home, night, childhood, segue into the author’s own fatherhood; the meditative tone; the rural setting : an image of continuity, perhaps.
This may seem a little dated to those only familiar with the great urban sweep from Rotterdam, east and south; it is, however, deeply ingrained in the Dutch cultural model.
Kopland has lived all his working life in the villages outside Groningen. This is where many still refer to as the real ‘rural’ Netherlands. These are the heartlands of the Dutch, the green ore that runs through the urban stonework.
What we read with Rutger Kopland, especially with these earlier books, are the books of the Dutch interior: the soul-lands. The irony is, Kopland is the least metaphysical of men; his insights are, I suspect, very much coloured by his profession as clinical neuroscientist.
Kopland was born in 1934; by the time of that terrible winter of German reprisals 1944/5, he would have 10 years old. 10, 000 died that winter.
Consider the following poem in the book: ‘Under the Apple Tree’:
Under the Apple Tree
I came home, it was about
eight and remarkable
close for the time of year,
the garden seat stood waiting
under the apple tree
I took my place and sat
watching how my neighbour
was still digging in his garden,
the night came out of the soil
a light growing bluer hung
in the apple tree
then slowly it once again became
too beautiful to be true, the day’s
alarms disappeared in the scent
of hay, toys again lay
in the grass and from far away in the house
came the laughter of children in the bath
to where I sat, to
under the apple tree
and later I heard the wings
of wild geese in the sky
heard how still and empty
it was becoming
luckily someone came and sat
beside me, to be precise it was
you who came to my side
under the apple tree,
remarkably close
for our time of life.
Masterly; we scarcely even notice the ‘literaryness’: the ballad-like repetitions of key phrases, the manipulation of mood-buttons. He earns our trust, and the trust of the ordinary reader by foisting no great ideas of redemption on us, by insinuating no Political awkwardness. We get the ‘feel’: the surburbanism of life lived by the ordinary person, with a job, family… in fact, do we recognise in ourselves: nostalgia for the past? This is a claim that plagued Kopland from these early books.
See how he builds the tension from stanza two: the juxtaposing of details of the neighbour (for which read, everyman/the identifier of self as ordinary: the classic Dutch sense of communalness), the change in light: the dark that identifies colours, blues…. Having keyed up the emotions at this point: the ‘…too beautiful to be true…’ (those last three qualifying words communicate so much, particularly in combination with preceding, ‘…once again…’), he immediately disengages and redirects; the emotional response is channelled via the toys in the grass to the house, the laughter of children. The emotions are stirred but not settled, their direction may have been channelled but the mind is made open, the imagination engaged by this ‘mental event’, so that when the geese fly they are identified immediately as ‘wild’, the sky is emptied by their presence, a sense of immanence is apparent. Once again this keying-up of emotions is channelled to the ‘…precisely you…’. An anchoring, grounding in the here and now.
Kopland displays here a willingness to be honest about feelings, a willingness to be open about his experience of them, of their place in his life and world.
And yes, he is privileged: he has a satisfying though demanding job, he has happy children, he has a close relationship with his partner. Is it Kopland, here? Or is it the ‘ordinary person’? Is it the person glad to be alive, having survived that last terrible winter of the War; like his neighbour he goes through the daily affirmation of survival.
Following a sequence of poems on his father’s death, we have:
Miss A
On September 19, a misty
nineteenth, Miss A stepped-off
from the wrong side of her house-boat
Sweet Content
into the waters of ‘The Deep’.
The cold had come, she had been unable
to get the stove to light,
her old mother had died,
everything was creaking, going to rust,
from her galley God and the
DHSS seemed out of reach.
She disembarked.
An altogether different piece. We have here, I think, irony used as a stylistic device; there is no longer the personalizing, intimate nature of the experience, but a distancing. A tragic event; but almost, in this retailing, a news item; the details of particulars: date, boat name, area of water.
The domestic details are all laid out for us to see, like the effects of a dead person, to be collected by relatives (us: readers-as-community?), or the unknowns who will come later when our attention is caught by other news. Whichever way it is read we, the reader, or, shall I qualify that: we, the ones amongst the readers who actually care what happened to her – are involved: her fate impinges upon us. We may not be responsible, but we are made witnesses. To be able to remain open, to witness, and not close-off is maybe one of the things makes a workable community.
This poem appeared in print in 1968. This is significant: 1968, and The Netherlands were as much caught up in social upheaval as we were in England. It may be this poem can be read as a response to the student protests, the extreme political factions.
Maybe this poem can be read as an attempt at affirming communal responsibilities.
The ironic yet engaged tone of the times, the response of older generation.
Kopland’s sharper mode was prompted to some extent by what he saw as misreadings of his work. After the anecdotal style a greater dissatisfaction with accepted things became apparent. There emerged a ‘stern’ period of disillusionment.
| Part 2: Traveller’s Tales |
 |
1966 was significant, it was the year Seamus Heaney published ‘Death of a Naturalist’. The two poets had basics in common: rural settings, anecdotal structures, a backward looking, to some extent, revisionist standpoint, a particular style of language use. For Heaney the language is an aural experience; metaphorical, wrought, highly percussive, using the resources of language to communicate but also inveigle an Irish, Catholic, tonality into the English canon.
For Kopland the language is conversational, ‘parlando’; yet at the same time the reader senses that each word is weighed, placed precisely. The subtexting is that of the common man in a society wrenched out of true by ‘the european experience’
Whereas Heaney takes issue with cultural identity, Kopland takes issue with time: the depredations of time on physical and mental processes, and through this the concepts of human worth and continuance.
Both writers gained world status.
In the later poems we have a moving away from recognisable environments; the sentence structure becomes less concrete, more impressionistic. There also emerges a surer handling of expression that is both probing and exploratory. It allows into the life experience some measure of immanence, mystery, some of the magic of ‘Under the Apple Tree’:
An Empty Spot to Stay
Go now into the garden, dear, and lie
in an empty spot where the grass grows tall.
That’s what I’ve always wanted to be,
an empty spot for someone, to stay.
Is this Kopland’s ‘paradise’? The nostalgic paradise readers detected in Kopland’s earlier period, he takes issue with, because it cannot be separated from an authoritarian, dare we say, predestined, design. Kopland is, if anything, a materialist, anti-mystic. ‘Everyone finds a lost paradise in my poetry, a longing for it. I don’t long for the past, I long for experience (…) and experience is new, now.’
A change has taken place, perhaps a distrust of exposure, of identity. But at the same time there is reaching out of national identity, to universality.
Kopland set about dismantling all the certainties and structures of his position; he became a wanderer, a traveller. In the true Dutch manner.
In Breughel’s Winter, based on the Hunters in the Snow painting, we have:
… At their feet the depths
grow and grow, become wider and further,
until the landscape vanishes into a landscape
that must be there, is there, but only
as a longing is there.
At our most objective there is still the desire for objectivity, that internal filter of all we perceive of the world, and what we are doing in it. Is it possible to go beyond even that, as in The Surveyor:
…he is a hole in the shape of
a man in the landscape.
and longing? See Conversation with the Wanderer:
What I want, he says, perhaps
I wanted to be a bird, a swallow
I saw, there, high in the mountains
………………..
as it was there, the moment I
disappeared from view, something
that exists beyond myself.
Notice that ‘I’, it is in the same position in the Dutch. And the playing with tenses: drama and dislocation, as though we are entering indeterminate territories.
This is fully realised in Bay, which deserves to be quoted in full:
It stays and it stays, it does not fade away:
a yellow beach with empty chairs,
a green and blue-green sea with little boats,
greyish mountains around it, and over all
a thin, lilac, coagulated light.
There was a movement before, something was moving endlessly,
it was the breathing of the sea, the gentle rasp
of the little boats at anchor, the gradual
darkening and disappearance of the bay:
something was about to arrive and it came, it came,
this was happiness.
Something motionless remains, a moment in which
the beach has been deserted, the sea grows still,
the anchor chains fall silent, the light retains
that ancient lilac, and nothing disappears – moment
in which the bay lies as it is, forever,
and a longing for the moment to pass.
An unpeopled landscape, except it is anything but. The sense of suspended time is masterly. Dutch is a stress-based poetry, like ours. Stress sets up expectations, onward flow, development, argument and conclusion. The Dutch avoids rhyme; the rhythm, based on the iambic, is frequently endstopped, falling with feminine endings, that defuse the tensions. The lines are beautifully cadenced; the repetitions only help further to arrest movement. Yet movement is desire, longing: it is the raison d’etre of the piece. Recognition, here, is acceptance of contraries, of the wandering ways of our sense of ‘onward’.
|
Part 3: A Gregorian Peace |
 |
Where do journeys end? What were settings in the early poems, now become things in their own right; the world has been stripped down to its constituents. It is interesting to see how far Kopland has travelled when we compare this poem from 1993 with his earlier work:
Among Cattle
And when the summer had come back again after all
And so we were sitting once more, drinking by the river.
His old arms still moved, to there, that world,
That slow, that eternal life of cattle in the distance.
Every human being should be an animal, should die
In the autumn and be re-born in the spring.
Or every human being should be a river, should come
Without a longing to remain, leave without nostalgia.
So we were sitting there and drinking again, passing time,
Old stories, genever, but the sun went down the same.
And he went to sleep. Because the world went to sleep.
Black he sat by the river, black hole in the prospect.
Now deeply versed in our human myths of living, our hopes, fears, equivocations and failures to measure up: the tonal and emotional ranges these lines weave and weave between are immense. The language and imagery now is scrupulously placed.
The human being becomes as much an object of the world as any other of its constituents parts. And as such just as subject to its laws of natural science.
Kopland uses the image of a ‘patient instrument’: “we were made by an impartial attentive/patient instrument, the same/ that breaks us down again.” (Your Back). It is also an image for language, and by extension, our ability to comprehend everything, whether by reason or instinct. He examines with it the human dimension. Patient, in that it enables him to look calmly at our extremis: dementia, ageing, death. He sees an aged one’s back, he wants to see the person, not just his own response, or his version of that person; his instrument shows him, not love: “ love is a word for something other /than what I was seeking…” (ibid), it shows him the commomplace that everyone ages; he also sees through his training a medical anatomy chart. All these have their part, all are acknowledged.
Language, our distinguishing feature, also distances us from that of which we speak. Can it also bring the world to us:
“there must be something now the word morning
slowly lights up and it becomes morning
that held us together and lets us go
as we lie here like this.”
(In the Morning) ?
His instrument‘s distancing allows him to see fables in our existence. His Message from the Isle of Chaos (1997) sits very well amongst Seamus Heaney’s fables in The Haw Lantern, and their background in the east European writers (Holub, Herbert in particular)
These examinations of ways and means, what language allows us, bears extraordinary fruit in The Latest Findings:
experts
have searched in human brains
…………………….
they recorded:
“Night fell through the windows of our institute
moonlight stroked across the young breasts
of our female experimental person
…………………………………
We are still searching feverishly for formulae.”
Desire, human warmth, love, still escape the limits of our study.
More pertinently, the most important human apprehensions continue to fall outside the scope of our microscopes:
because happiness is a memory
it exists because at the same time
the reverse is also true
I mean this: because happiness
reminds us of happiness it pursues
us and therefore we flee from it
happiness
must exist somewhere at some time because
we remember it and it reminds us.
(What is Happiness?)
Richard Pool, reviewing for ‘Poetry Wales’ wrote of Kopland’s “existentialist poetry”. I find the writing more Phenomenological. Based on Husserl’s work, the present-day Phenomenologists present the experience of mind as a series of recursive mental events: echoes of echoes looping back and forth through our brain’s maps of world and self. It is as though we continually restructure our maps on a daily basis, as the pattern at play in the brain changes.
The extra ingredient, the rider, is a sense of futurity: anticipation.
Here we have Kopland’s exploratory template as he explores and objectifies in his writing. There is an increasing sense of wonder, openness, what Belgian critic Herman de Coninck called the “Gregorian peace” of the later work.
We now encounter titles like, Until it Lets Us Go (1997), even the title of the Harvill collection, Memories of the Unknown, or the recent book, What Water Leaves Behind. All these exhibit, I would argue, a Phenomenologist sense of numinous wonder, where the world of objects is found to be the one reality, and within it is possible happiness, love, desire, all we find there. These are, as Phenomenlogist professor Dan Lloyd called, ‘the insensible dimensions that constitute reality.’
It is always best to let the writer have last say:
A Garden in the Evening
Things are happening here and I am the only
one who knows which
I shall name them and also say why
there’s an old garden seat standing under the apple-tree
there’s an old football lying in the grass
there are old sounds coming out of the house
there is an old light in the sky
this is happening here: a garden in the evening
and what you don’t hear and don’t see – the places
where we dug holes
and filled them up again, weeping
I tell you this because I do not want to be alone
before I am.
