Kim Moore

As you probably know by now, I usually read prose. That is to say, 'a form of language that has no formal metrical structure. It applies a natural flow of speech, and ordinary grammatical structure, rather than a rhythmic structure. Normal everyday speech is spoken in prose and most people think and write in prose form', according to Google. So this blog is basically prose.

The thing I don't usually read (or listen to) is poetry. It's not that I am allergic to poetry, as some people are, finding it boring or slow or pretentious, it's just that it not something I really come across in my everyday life.

The big exception to this is Dichters in de Prinsentuin (Poets in the Prince's Garden), a poetry festival in Groningen each summer. It takes place in the Prince's Garden, which is a beautiful garden in the centre of the city, protected from the hustle and bustle around it by high walls. I should really go there more often, but because it is so secluded, you actually forget it's there. During the festival, the poets perform on what is known as the 'tea field' near the tea house, and also in the 'loofgangangen', which are the circular hedges that you can get romantically lost in. These hedges have little 'windows' behind which the poets stand and recite their poetry. The great thing about this festival is that it combines famous and published poets with amateurs, and puts them all on the same level in the loofgangen.

Last year, someone shanghaied me into volunteering, and I enjoyed it so much I did it again this year. Not because I care so much about the poets (I don't know about 90% of them, which doesn't really come in handy when they get free access and I still try to get them to buy tickets because I don't recognise them), but I really love the atmosphere this little festival generates, and being outside a whole day, and just helping out in such a great initiative.

But this year, there was a poet who really grabbed me. Now most of the festival is in Dutch, but the first evening was in another location, and it was an international event, with one poet from Iraq, one from the UK, and one from Macedonia. The poets first read in their own language, followed by their official Dutch translator reading the same poem in Dutch. Which wasn't really necessary for the English poet, because most people can understand English pretty well. At the moment I didn't know whether it was because you could actually understand her, or because the poems were just so great, but I really really loved the British poet, Kim Moore.

I don't know what it is about English, but somehow everything sounds more beautiful in it. Stuff that would be sappy and cliche and sometimes even plain horrible in Dutch, is romantic and thoughtful and deep in English. I think in in part it has something to do with the rhythm of the language, the way the stresses are placed, and part with the fact that we Dutch are just way too 'nuchter' (down to earth) to really get lost in poetry. One of my favourite poems, The Lady of Shalott, could never ever exist in Dutch, because it is way too flowery and romantic.

Anyway, back to Kim Moore. She looks so typically British it is almost deceiving. Most of the poets on these festivals have something weird or typically 'them' (funny hair, hats, weird habits or a funny way of talking), but she just stood there in jeans and a tank top, reading some of the most beautiful poems I've ever heard. So following her performance, I did something I've never done before, which is to buy a poetry book. And then I had another first, as I actually went up to Kim Moore, and asked her to sign the thing. Which she gladly did, although I felt bad about distracting her from her friends and her beer, so I babbled something incomprehensible, and then I left.

And then I started to read.

I know the thing about poems is that you should read them very slowly and thoughtfully, and reread, and try to grasp its meaning and deeper layers before moving on to the next. Also, you should go through the book in sequence, because the poet is actually meaning something with that sequence, and each poem will add something to the next. 

Of course, I did neither of those things; I just started reading and reading, gobbling up the poems, somethings skipping a few and reading ahead, or going back to read a short one that caught my eye. Doesn't matter, they were all great. The subject matter is familiar and recognisable, the sentences are down to earth, but the rhythms and cadence are just right, the figurative language is spot on, and the message is something anyone can understand. These are small, tiny things, that pack a whole history in a few lines. I wish I could share all of them with you, but that would be unfair to Kim, as nobody would buy her book anymore. So I'm just going to give you the first one:

And the Soul

And the soul, if she is to know

herself, must look into the soul...

- Plato

And the soul, if she is to know herself

must look into the soul and find

what kind of beast is hiding.

And if it be a horse, open up the gate

and let it run. And if it be a rabbit

give it sand dunes to disappear in.

And if it be a swan, create a mirror image,

give it water. And if it be a badger

grow a sloping woodland in your heart.

And if it be a tick, let the blood flow

until it's sated. And if it be a fish

there must be a river and a mountain.

And if it be a cat, find some people

to ignore, but if it be a wolf,

you'll know from its restless way

of moving, if it be a wolf,

throw back your head

and let it howl.

Now from the outside, this poem has everything to be pretentious and woolly; there is a quote by Plato, it has these sentences that end in funny ways, it is weirdly repetitious until suddenly it isn't, and it's about souls. Really, if you're a poetry hater, this is the perfect example. 

Still, I think this poem actually proves all of that wrong. I think this is a really accessible poem, which doesn't really look like very heavy stuff because of all the animal imagery (she really likes her wolves, by the way), but when you think about it, it actually is about something. So you can just read it, have a nice picture in your head, and move on. But you can reread it, and then you start to see other thing in it, and think about what it means, and start to think about souls, and how a soul could look into a soul, and what kind of animal your soul would be, and whether animals have souls, and whether that is what they mean with a soul looking into a soul; you can only think about these things because you are human, etc etc. So there are lots of layers to the poem, but still when you read it, it is this beautiful image of the soul as different animals.

And that's just the first one!

Anyway, that's my poetry lecture for today. Go and read her stuff, if I've inspired you. She keeps a blog about poetry, which is a lot better than what I've just told you, and will probably lead you on to other great poets. Or even better, you could turn off your electronics, buy her book, and read some of her poems while sitting in a nice city centre garden, sipping tea and being totally away from it all.

Writing in German

So my Postcrossing has been a bit on-off for the past few months, with me only sending out cards one or two days a week, 3-5 at most, and as a result I haven't really received many cards either. There were some spectacular ones, including my first postcard from New Zealand and a nice card from India, but on the whole, it's been a bit quiet.
But one strange thing I have been noticing that most of my cards from Germany (incidentally also the country most of my cards have been coming from) were written in German. Now this is no problem, I can read German perfectly and write an adequate response in return, but it's very typical that all of a sudden all German people are only writing in their own language. Is this a new trend? Have I missed something about going back to basics? Is this a new form of national pride springing up?
Probably it's just a coincidence, with several of the senders being between 8 and 14, and therefore probably unable to write in English. Also, yesterday I received another card from Germany in perfect English, although the text on the front was a German joke (which sounds like a contradiction in terms).
Also, I've received a card from Belgium that was written in English, Dutch, German and French, which was nice. Nicer at least than the people from Asian countries who include characters in their postcard that I simply can't read, or the Finnish girl that made a joke about calling her cat 'Humpuuki', which I thought was just a funny name but turns out to mean 'fake'. If I cannot understand what you're saying without opening Google Translate, it kinda takes away from the message.
So I'll take the German ones any day, at least those I can read.

Alpha vs beta

In the Netherlands, there exists a differentiation between 'alpha' and 'beta' people. This difference starts in secondary school, when you have to choose between an 'alpha' or 'beta' profile, the first including mostly languages and/or creative subjects, the second being the science subjects. It is almost impossible to combine the two, especially since most schools now offer 4 'streams' you can choose from: nature & mechanics, nature & health, economics & society and economics & culture (the last one is a combination of things I still fail to understand). Once you're in a stream, your somewhat fixed, and it's almost impossible to take courses from any of the other streams (as classes are planned on the same time, e.g., 'chemistry is 3rd period, so we can plan arts history then as well, as nobody will want to take both'). But also further in life, people can ask you whether you are a typical alpha or beta person (or 'gamma', if you're into psychology) and then judge you as creative or logical or social or anti-social accordingly. You are put into the 'alpha' or 'beta' box and stay there.
I know this system does not exist in most other countries. I know, because I've tried to explain it to so many foreigners, who have looked at me blankly as I struggled to make it clear. It isn't clear. It's not really a 'system' either, it's just a way of labelling people, putting them into boxes to make things easier.
Of course, there are some people who do not fit in either of these boxes. I was at a talk by someone who studied Dutch, history and geography, and there was another person who studied economics and English. All of these things are not easily 'married' in the Dutch educational system, but do still belong to the 'alpha' box. It becomes even more difficult when you try to live in both boxes.
In secondary school, I took the 'nature & health' profile, but I added German and Spanish on to that, because I really enjoyed science but I also really enjoyed languages. I studied Biology, which went pretty well, but when it turned out (during my research MSc) that this was not the way I wanted to spend my life, I studied English Language & Culture after that. I enjoy science, reading about science, and discovering things, but I also love languages, reading, writing, and creating. Strangely enough, I do not enjoy the 'scientific' side of languages: linguistics. It is a weird combination.
Now it seems that weird combination has landed me a job. As there are so very few people who combine an interest in science with an interest in language, there are also very few people who can write scientific school books. And I've been doing an internship at a publisher for school books. And they mentioned they needed people who had affiliation with both 'beta' subjects and language, and whether I knew someone. I mentioned that I knew myself. Somehow, this led to me getting a temporal position at the 'beta' department for secondary education.
The interesting thing is, the third person I met in this department studied chemistry and arts. That is crossing the alpha/beta division even more than my biology and English. So now I'm starting to wonder what we're trying to achieve with this alpha/beta divide. Clearly, there are many people who do not fit in these standardised boxes. So making the world easier to grasp by trying to put secondary school pupils in one of four streams may be throwing a way a lot of good things, as people are not encouraged to stimulate other parts of their interests. They may enjoy biology and chemistry, but also history and geography, and now they have to choose. This may cause frustration, but also lead to poorer results because they have to take the 'full package' of what comes with the stream, regardless of whether they also like for example maths. If you choose a 'beta' stream, you have to take the whole thing. I was able to compliment my science profile with languages, and after 9 years of university have finally managed to find a place where I can use both. But how many people have to suppress or ignore part of what they love to do because they do not 'fit' in the system?
If we are the only (that I know of) country actually using this weird system, maybe it's time to look critically, and dispose of it. There are no 'alpha' or 'beta' people. There are just people, with loves and interests, and they should be able to study and learn everything they want.

A chameleon of accents

It was during one of my first classes for my bachelor English, I think it must have been some Linguistics course, that I realised that not everybody speaks the same English. Up until that moment, British English and American English and Australian English sounded perfectly similar to me (I did like the people in Australian series better, but that may have been because the Australians simply make better youth tv series). This was the same as listening to my grandfather speak to my mother, he with a strong local accent, she answering in standard Dutch: I could understand both of them, so I didn't notice that they were speaking different accents.
After thinking about this for a while, I have decided that this was not weird. It may have been weird because I was studying English, and thus must have had some under laying affinity with the language, and thus may have noticed these differences before, but as I was mainly studying English for the written variety (literature, perhaps writing some things myself), this wasn't really an issue.
But for me, accents have never really been an issue. My mother never tires of telling how I, after we'd been in France for a couple of days, perfectly adapted to the French accent and would call "mama!" in the French rather than the Dutch way (there is a strong difference between these two), copying the French kids around me. I have also spoken with an Amsterdam accent for a while, which may have been influenced by the tv programmes I watched. Then, when I started getting friends in the south of the Netherlands, my accent shifted to their pronunciation, sometimes to the confusion of my northerly friends.
It took quite a long while to fix on a 'proper' accent for my English studies (yes, we get proficiency in the language as well), perhaps because of all the mixed influences I was getting. I have been called Mid-Atlantic by some, which is not really a compliment. But finally, I picked British English, and passed my speaking courses with this. However, after only a week in America, people started to ask me where I lived or studied, as my accent was so genuine (I have since found out that Americans will say that someones English is 'great' when they can utter simple sentences, but I have the feeling that this went a bit further than that). I also noticed in myself that I started pronouncing things in an American way; rhotic (that means, pronouncing the 'r' in certain locations in words, Americans do this, most British don't) and generally rolling the words around in my mouth more, the way Americans do.
I think this is simply an adaptive strategy. When I talked in British English, I sometimes had to repeat myself as others did not immediately understand me. When I went with the American accent, it was easier to make myself understood, and it was also easier to deal with things without getting the added 'she's a foreigner!' bit. Same goes for my Dutch accents; it is adaptive, but also a way of blending in. When in the south of the country, if you speak in a strong northern accent, people will look at you in a funny way, and you immediately feel like you don't belong.
I have no idea why I do this (it is clearly not a conscious effort on my part, even more, I was trying to maintain my British accent in America and failed miserably): it is an automatic thing. When talking to an Indian shopkeeper in America, I almost replied to him with an Indian accent, but caught myself just in time (I was afraid he may have thought that I was making fun of him or something). It comes in handy, usually, as like I said people will take less notice and you will blend in. But it does puzzle me, and sometimes worries me a bit. The way you speak shows where you're from, your background, your culture, your roots. If I will just adapt to whatever location I find myself in, people will never go "ah, but she's from the north! clearly!" when I open my mouth. This may be a good thing, in some instances, but on the whole I would like it if my accents would be a bit more stable, and I would be a little bit less of a copycat.