Martine van Bijlert
Oyster River Pages: Who do you consider to be your creative ancestors and contemporaries for your art and/or writing? How does your creative work converse with theirs?
Martine van Bijlert: The first poetry collection I ever bought, at sixteen, from a discount bin, was a bilingual edition in Dutch and English of e.e. cummings. I’d never heard of him but was intrigued by the title (the triangular why). Reading him made me feel like I could write.
In terms of contemporaries, I guess I feel inspired by people who go both deep and wide. For instance, an artist called Tom Kemp, who went through the whole process of learning how to throw large pots because he wanted a curved surface for his single-brush calligraphies. For instance, Hanif Abdurraqib who’s a great poet, but also knows every sample of every intro of every song he’s ever heard. For instance, Judith Butler who has not just written about gender trouble, but also about war and precariousness and grievability.
I also feel affinity with documentary poets, like Solmaz Sharif or Muriel Rukeyser. There's a rigour and an honesty there, that I admire. And after years of writing non-fiction political analysis, I’m ready to see what I can do with poetry in this field too.
ORP: What books have you read more than once in your life?
MVB: It's a bit of a random collection: An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, probably The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Bluets by Maggie Nelson.
I often want to immediately reread a book that I loved, to look at the language and how it was done, but I rarely get around to it.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
MVB: I speak three languages—Dutch, English and Farsi (with an Afghan accent)—and carry snippets of several others (French, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Turkish). Although Dutch is my first language and I live in the Netherlands now, it has often felt a little fuzzy and awkward to me. Maybe because English is the language I’ve used most, for decades already, and that I feel most articulate in. It’s also in English that I first learned to write, at an international school in Iran.
Farsi is the only language I became near-fluent in as an adult and it’s the language of emotional connection for me. It’s what I heard as a child, but didn’t learn. I can still remember the thrill of the first word I managed to decipher and how sweet it was to be able to joke. Listening, being heard, being able to speak. There’s an intimacy, for me, that feels hard-won and close.
Does that influence my work? I think anything that’s deeply felt influences our work.
ORP: What does vulnerability mean to you as an artist and/or writer?
MVB: At some point you need to go there, whatever it is you're making. You don't need to feel vulnerable all the time, but it's unavoidable that at some point you have to face something you're afraid of, say something you're not sure of, admit that you might not be up to the task.
