Frank Keizer: »Poems«

Frank Keizer: Poems
Translated by Donald Gardner
Frank Keizer, born in 1987, is a poet, critic and editor. He is
the author of two chapbooks and two volumes of poetry, Onder
normale omstandigheden (Pelckmans, 2016) and Lief slecht ding
(Polis, 2019). He works as a publisher at Perdu in Amsterdam,
where he heads a publication series for experimental poetry in
translation, and is an editor for nY, a Flemish literary magazine
devoted to literature and criticism. He has been part of numerous
festivals all over the world and currently resides in Rotterdam,
where he is writing his third book of poetry tackling questions of
collaborative survival amidst environmental decay and precarity.

when the grounds became free of access they fell to seed many people roamed
around and so they were harassed by laws and regulations against vagrancy
as for me I retreated from the first palings to the prison because I was
interested in the organization of the cell not to romanticize the base
but because from the little I knew about political prisoners I gathered something
about renewal and resistance a potential restoration you could construct a philosophy
on the grounds of what they taught themselves in such straitened circumstances as these
to ensure themselves a food supply for instance they practically became botanists
who familiarized themselves with the edible plants around and cultivated them arming
themselves with knowledge which had been neglected and even actively sabotaged
this didn’t mean that they could eradicate the violence done to them
on the contrary there was nothing other than simultaneity in creation and destruction
always remember how the situation appears from below instead of above
take a good look at how actions circulate and don’t look so bashful you marxist
so lacking in concepts they don’t take deep root here you have a method
true it’s a bit vulgar not something you easily come across in a study but it works
by acting differently and so research began in the cell into ethnobotany as survival
that hardly differed from the immediate experience and offered no theory
rather the cultivation of an untidy praxis a whole range of different patches
without any fixed system that takes shape underground you are watchfully active

also I noticed about new solidarity that our mode of organization is cellular it doesn’t
need formal movements I heard in the scraps of conversation that I picked up

it started with me looking for a word for the road that you and I and they
can walk not the runway we were only hurtled along
when I noticed that the difference between these roads had become unclear I found
it later only in textbooks so I forced myself to act by other assumptions
they led to an open place where two histories crossed paths
once a site that led to a point close to where the waters divided
we streamed together there to find peace and to whisper technologies
through the trees to drown out the factories with our humming to consume
what the cards had forecast for us so we traced an escape route
ask ourselves out loud now do you want to help keep up this plot

the remnants have been scraped together bit by bit you need patience
it’s the only way etymology is sometimes unreliable and if you get too little info
you suspect that the knowledge has been smashed some language is so forgotten
it no longer even recalls the contempt so frustrated you feel you almost never in fact
you can’t go on till you realize it is maybe also absorbed and something still gets through
the bars in the bends and blockages you can hear something from a lee different from
repression through which intensities light up you want to belong to
even if it is at most something whispered to avoid using that word community again
the reference to the linguistic powerlessness of modern man
can be concealed behind the discovery of new land while what concentrates
in the grammar is the nightmare of the repression of existence in the prison of language
therefore columbus is honoured and nebrija is forgotten writes ivan Illich go on now
without honouring with your research into liberation that is no open-season shoot-out

it feels like I’ve fallen into the hands of rabid
democrats, dutiful people like us
who work weekends and have no wish
to take part in the war of each against all
but I’m in Brussels
I do what I like doing
and sometimes get paid for it
the new work ethics is not spiteful
being worn out has consequences
existence means survival and sincerity is a form
of disillusioned luxury
the left has become stupid
and nothing can be achieved
without European backing
so we set up meetings and these lead to other meetings
how can we organize each other?
I’ll never say this again and after that I’m free
the perfect storm is a shower
in the united colours of Benneton

es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen
Adorno tells me, and for a while
I’ve kept quiet about that
and still gone on living
how can I blather so
when I’m so bogged down
I write my feelings
that they make me suffer
and ask them why they won’t change me
after that I did many searches on Google
which also doesn’t know how it feels
to be alive in the twenty-first century
I mean, that’s trying something
bumping up against connections and flexibility
how does that feel?

we say we
don’t need any theory
but theory survives
theory seeps through
into mumbling
into famished mouths
into sex and into fragility
fragility is important
is touch, is democracy and thus
it is no issue
no parliamentary representation is possible
no transformation
positive stress and security are made for me
in Bangladesh
not more emancipated
but more stupid, by which I mean
failing without ulterior motives
because I am trying to imagine
what a repaired world would look like
and then I think of the packets of crisps and the national sentiment
that I eat and I eat
till I get sick

ecause under normal circumstances
I have grown up
and I became an adult during the crisis years
my poetry is a poetry
of the crisis
in which I have burst open and write
with what remains
the mess I don’t clean up
letting it grow warm
in my hands, my innards
and the network
that gets overheated
showing the not exactly subtle reality
of someone
who is twenty-seven in 2015
and doesn’t add up to the description of his reality

ecause under normal circumstances
I had declared my identity redundant
(it made me lonesome and arrogant)
I found identity in other people
who were themselves
as for me I was unmarked and free
I possessed the real freedom
and cashed it in
even so I went looking
for my own fuckedupness
because I was empty inside
I became a political poet on the stage and in magazines
and an academic at the university
they created me
and because I was infillable they filled me in
now I dismantle myself
and say goodbye to the nineties
I lose the symbolic function
the antisymbolism of the symbolic murder
and the illusory freedom
as a messy heap of personal properties
I have become detached from the series
and the grasp of the government
dislodged from the lap of Wim Kok
I demolish myself
and become the lightest thing
the softest thing
I am broken and I sing

ecause under normal circumstances
the public domain had died
and the city had been redeveloped
a fact I too benefit from
so I don’t intervene
in cultural matters
because the bureaucrats already do that for me
as a normal person
I am at the border and deploy my good
behaviour to get across it
my whiteness and confusion
are mechanisms I don’t trust
I become (way out that is no way out) ambivalent
about my disenchantment
wonder at what point
I woke up
as the opportunist I was

»survivors of a winter of bad news now the long vacation«
European Climate Fiction
Digital Essay
lcb.de/programm/european-climate-fiction
Frank Keizer: Poems (1–3: unpublished, 4–9 in: Lief slecht ding (Polis, 2019))
Translated by Donald Gardner
Foto: © Koen Broos