I believe that poetry, ideally, has its feet in the mud and its head in the clouds.

Lately, I’ve been picturing my works and myself in these terms; as poetry made by an artisan.

Not to sure yet how that relates to Art made by an Artist, but I don’t mind setting myself slightly apart from what is being taken for granted as Art and Artists.

The Dutch artist Rob Scholte once said that who claims to be an alternative artist is even more pretentious than the one who claims ‘just’ to be an artist.

I think he has a point, but nevertheless, I have always been attracted by the position just off the track.

Most probably because I like my context to be undefined, to define it myself.

Being “off the track” is a bit unsettling and to be unsettling means to raise doubts.

Poetry, believe it or not, can be unsettling when it introduces new ways of perception.

True, violence can be unsettling as well, but violence unsettles me because it provides the exact opposite: a void in which everything else becomes absolutely meaningless.

This made me think about a line of poetry of the famous Dutch painter and poet Lucebert (1924 – 1994) : “Alles van waarde is weerloos”. 

In English:  “All that is valuable is defenseless.”

Ironically, as to prove the defencelessness of this poem, the phrase was hijacked by a Rotterdam insurance company and put on the top of their office building in neon letters in the 1980s. Every time I went past that building, I wished I could add the phrase : “Anything of value can’t be insured.”

Because, in my opinion, this is the consequence of Lucebert’s poem about the true nature of ‘value’. Things of Value are of such fundamental importance that concepts like insurance, logic, usefulness, attack or defence, beauty and meaning don’t apply.

But what does apply? I think the concept of poetry applies to things of value. 

I consider that things of value are things of value when they contain a poetical truth.

A poetical truth is a self-explanatory quality which we recognize in things of value.

And things of value are what Lucebert considered to be of things of value, in his famous poem…

I’m aware; this is a classic example of circular reasoning, but that is hardly dismissive, as self-referentially is actually a key concept in the power of poetry.

For example, self referentially is an essential quality of many creation stories,

like this one:   “In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and what existed was covered by death and hunger.  He thought, “Let me have a self”,  and he created the mind. “

(second and fourth Brahmanas of the Brhad-arayaka Upanishad. India in the 700s / 600s B.C)

You see? Very powerful, self-referential and literary creative!

I suppose that what could serve as criteria for ‘things of value’ might be the creative power of their poetry; their power to create a self-explanatory poetic truth.

Here is a phrase that I cooked up in relation to this subject:

“Surely, one cannot engineer a bridge by just applying poetry.

But then again, without poetry, what would it bridge ?”