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Maarten van der Graaff

I want to talk to a fascist

Maarten van der Graaff’s debut collection Getawaycarpoems (2013) opens with the line ‘enormous enormous space’. In the 50 pages that follow, the poet fills this space by painting, sketching and blotting with an incessant flow of words.

Lucid announcements switch to absurd scenes; a fleeting thought can grow into a whole story or remain fleeting, or it can turn completely into its opposite, because as Van der Graaff writes in ‘The athlete trusts his jump’:

‘Only fascists never contradict themselves’.

Alternating between youthful elation and boundless boredom, Van der Graaff tries to express ‘how tired everything is’ and, simultaneously, how ‘fragrant and/ useless and light’. This results in sprawling poems that show what it is like to live and read in this very moment; what it is like to be bored to death every now and then; and what it feels like to refuse to give up hoping, maybe even believing, in something more. ‘I like question marks that are everything but profound. Can I go?

Getawaycarpoems was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize for the best Dutch-language debut collection in 2014. The jury called Van der Graaff an ‘immensely resourceful poet’ and praised ‘the breadth of Van der Graaff ’s poems, regarding composition, vocabulary and themes’. Soon after, Van der Graaff published his second book, Dead Work. Here again the poet stands firmly situated in the current day and reports his findings without holding back. His tone is confident and free from illusion. In ‘Lists’, the first half of the book, and ‘Clocked poems’, the second half, he attempts to create cohesion between his life and surroundings. This attempt is as slippery (‘The shape of my existence shows itself/ as crumbly factuality,’ he writes) as it is necessary, because there is:

‘a social sphere I don’t understand./ I want to write for those who/ are found in this space.’

Van der Graaff is the Molotov cocktail of Dutch poetry.

De Morgen

Resourceful and mocking he conquers a spot of his own in poetry. He’s a poet with guts.

Trouw

He is definitely the best poet of his generation.

De Groene Amsterdammer

LIST OF CIVIC SONGS (fragment)

Tonight I want to talk to a fascist.
By soft light and beer, on Europe
and on bosses, the bosses of bosses.
It will be like we’re in a saloon,
the food and drink of an underwater city.
And in the twilight, in each other’s lust
we will see Europe and know that something old
has been taken from us.
I eat in front of the television. I am the citizen of a
state,
eat a microwave meal, watch a rerun of Frasier.
It is my duty to eat the sausage and lick clean the
gravy tray.
Online I read a polemic essay that I once wrote
and despise the petty style, the calculation.
(…)
(Translation by Willem Groenewegen)

Maarten van der Graaff

Maarten van der Graaff (b. 1987) published Getawaycarpoems (2013) and Dead Work (2015) and was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize for best debut collection in 2014. He is co-founder and editor of the online literary journal Samplekanon, and an instructor in Creative Writing at the ArtEZ Institute of…

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I want to talk to a fascist . Poëzie.

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11 Poets from Holland

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