Paul van Ostaijen (1896–1928)

Paul van Ostaijen has always been one of my favourite poets, and no analysis-session in Dutch language class has diminuished that.

In "Bezette Stad" (Occupied City), which was written 100 years ago, he uses his signature, unique style of playing with words, with their double meaning, repeating sounds to paint the picture, adding rhythm and typography, inserting other languages (here French, English and German). The soul of Antwerp in 1914.
This truely is like a Jazz jamm-session on paper.… (más)

Paul Van Ostaijen was at the centre of a group of very young avant-garde writers and artists in Antwerp during the First World War. After the war he went into exile in Berlin for a few years to escape prosecution for his activities in far-left Flemish nationalist politics. There he came into contact with the full range of radical artistic movements of the time, in particular expressionism, dadaism and cubism. He returned to Belgium in 1921, ran an art gallery in Brussels for a while, and died of TB at the age of 32.

The poems in Bezette stad (originally published in 1921; English translation Occupied City, 2016) are in a form he called "typographic expressionism" in which the size and shape of the letters, as well as things like the angle of the lines on the page and the relation between text and white-space, are used as part of the poetic structure. One or two poems (like "Zeppelin") also use Apollinaire-style illustrative typography. Each main poem has a lino-cut by Van Ostaijen's friend Oscar Jespers as title page. Jespers also did a lot of the typography and some custom woodblock engravings for the poems themselves.

As the title implies, the poems are mostly concerned with Antwerp during the war: shells, refugees, Zeppelins, soldiers lining up outside a brothel, notices and advertisements in Dutch, French and German, an imitation circus poster advertising a performance by the famous knockabout trio "Godsdienst Vorst & Staat" (church, king and state), representations of music, an ode to the Danish silent film star Asta Nielsen, a view of the empty harbour, visions of death and destruction, etc. The effect is very contrapuntal, a bit like the multiple voices in T S Eliot's "The Waste land", but much louder and brasher because of the way it's all emphasised by the typography. And because Van Ostaijen was about a million times more subversive than Eliot.

Nagelaten Gedichten brings together the poems still uncollected at Van Ostaijen's death, mostly from 1920 or later. These are a bit more conventional in visual form, but still heavily influenced by expressionism. Things like flowers and musical instruments keep popping up at unexpected moments, there are sections of free association based purely on sounds, plenty of found phrases (often from other languages), and quite a number of the poems are — or claim to be — in dance forms. Some very interesting, some very funny, many simply puzzling...… (más)