Astrid Lamb writes with “demonic intensity” in “an indomitably sensual language that demands re-reading and re-listening”, according to the BC Hooft Prize jury. He announced on Wednesday morning that he will be sent to Lambi next year. Lampe (1955) is the sixth poet to receive the annual €60,000 literary prize.
She is not a poet known for beautiful, sweet, or clear poetry. Her works, which comprise thirteen collections, are “strikingly unconventional,” according to the jury. “How do I read this?” Lamb himself actually wrote in the collection Sister City 2.0 (2018). “Follow her, and continue to measure the gold content/finished jewelry,” she wrote prompting an answer. In other words: stay alert for kitsch.
“I’m interested in what moves people,” she said in an interview more than twenty years ago. “What moves me and what these feelings consist of.” But this does not mean that her poems are confessions of the stirrings of her personal soul, where kitsch lurks. In that interview, Lamb also strongly opposed “the misunderstanding that poetry is something like: beautifully expressing something we feel deeply.” The wording should be an experience, but not a reference to “something” that conveys a feeling.
And beautiful’? In her first collection Rib (1997), Lamb actually used this word in a poem about a museum visit. There’s a ‘pretty’ that sounded like a ‘courtship call’ from visitors, and it’s a killer scent mark too. Because that word “measures without eyes / beautiful beautiful crucifies the kiss of death / beautiful beautiful impales butterflies to life / shaking their heads.”
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Soft chick
Lamb wants to capture life in her wild, musical poetry. in Rib She wrote about a delicate chick who must first emerge from the egg: “Yesterday’s rules/ I offer them as lyric seeds/ To break the rules/ Fresh/ Today// So that: it is possible again, permissible again/ The courage of the egg remains/ We dry and prepare to wake -/The light around the heart.” You can read it as a metaphor for the poet who continues and breaks tradition so that he can sing his own song.
Lamb did not do so without struggle, though there was immediate appreciation for her poetry collections, in which those life-affirming lyricism played the central role. “This poetry hides nothing but spreads words, sounds and meanings with a generous hand,” wrote the jury of the Ida Gerhard Poetry Prize, which Lamb (“architect of language and musician of language”) received for her collection. Spray your RAL colour (2005).
However, many critics were also dizzy, searching for the meaning of her hermetic lyricism: Piet Gerbrandi once sighed that Lamb would have to read her poems, “because you would not, like trained readers of poetry, need to understand every line.” “.
It was necessary to fold. But as long as you, like Lamb, use existing words, the verses are more than their sound. Lamb himself took the fact that meaning can also be given to seemingly randomly assembled language as the starting point for the collection Mourning with animals (2013). In it she “sampled” the anthologies: she built new combinations of existing poetic lines. “It allows existing lyricism and language to be combined, without leaving any record unused,” PC Hooft’s judges said. “The result is an open text, a language that is aware of itself and its limits.”
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Chalk circles in the grass/ dictates the playing field.” class=”dmt-article-suggestion__image” src=”https://images.nrc.nl/QMfekHCoHSxxVIR7QBqjeqgxVak=/160×96/smart/filters:no_upscale()/s3/static.nrc.nl/bvhw/files/2022/01 /data80365597-1c4218.jpg”/>
Increasingly more active
What are those limits? What can language do? Over the past decade, Lamb’s poetry has focused more on the current outside world—the modern era has infused her poems, from the Amazon to the outside world. Lone wolfBarista and the World Bank. It became a poetry that did not accept the status quo, a chaotic world that Lampe saw struggling under climate change, capitalism, and totalitarian technology.
Can dysphoria, an “open” text, change the minds of conditioned people? in Tulip vodka (2021), people went into lockdown, and Lamb’s story extended beyond the coronavirus pandemic: “In the mainstream story, oil is Viagra / Mood is tied to the stock market / Dangerous mood.” Lambie gradually became more active, and her fight against kitsch and counterfeiting became more outward-looking. in Sister City 2.0 It was really about a group of poets visiting a desert town together. Are they doing something good, something meaningful? However, they continue to go against the current, searching for fertile ground: “Now that the main stream keeps driving the crowds downtown / We take like a rabbit this salmon ladder / And the shortest way to the spawning grounds.”
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