P/P | r2c | March: When Day Equals Night

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	"...I had forgotten how it was, that the spring is not a silent flowering, soft dreaming, but intense growing, already passionate beginnings, leaping up out of a deep sleep, dancing away without a thought. " from Spring, a poem by M. Vasalis This week, an image called Digging Out, Spring Snow. Click left or here for companion image, Coltsfoot, First Flowers of Spring Also: seven new translations of Lowland poems. follow r2c on twitter r2c_dutchpoetry

One of the things which we traditionally have come to expect of poetry is that it both celebrates and articulates the large-scale movements of the natural year. Of course, how it does this, and the type and quality of movements the poetry calls attention to, will depend very much on the culture to which it belongs. At the same time, there is a kind of necessary co-evolution taking place, because poetry—at least in the view being considered here—is one of the more important formative forces which gives shape to the culture.

This is because poetry deals essentially with how we see ourselves and the world: new insights, new ways of understanding emotions, new ways of seeing the significance of even the smallest of details experienced in everyday life.

But the seasons? The rhythms of natural change? What more could be added to the well-known classical expressions—now almost cliches—of descriptive, pastoral, scenes of the earth changing its clothes, so to speak, as it moves from one time of year to the next? Well, that depends, does it not. My own feeling is that a great deal might be added. and necessarily so, for if anything, it can be argued—and that is certainly my position—that present Western culture as we know it is profoundly lost in both time and space. By this I mean simply that both natural time and space have been largely—and it seems to me that everyone at least tacitly experiences some sense of loss here— colonized by, for lack of a better term, the commercial powers that be. That is why time is becoming strictly homogenized, 24/7, as the current saying goes, anytime being evidently as good as the next. And the space, especially in North America, is structured to fit the movements of cars and not humans, and lacks almost entirely strong, articulate, living, centers.

Centers. Places where essences converge. Like a flower, or a poem, or in a more prosaic sense, a lively coffee house or concert hall.

But time? Ah yes, now we come to spring and vernal equinox, when day equals night. Of the seven new translations of Dutch poems offered here, four directly concern the time of year of new beginnings which in English we call Spring. (Ponder for a moment the many beautiful meanings of that word—a leap of new-born lamb, the new shoot of a plant, the source of eternally fresh, cool, water—all converging together). The Dutch, however, say "voorjaar" which means literally a kind of 'prelude year' or year before the main one which comes with summer. Spring, by M. Vasalis, shares with us a lovely sequence of images which somehow helps to root ourselves for a moment squarely in time and space, and yet at the same time almost standing outside of it. The Crocus, by Albert Verwey, calls our attention to the similarity of this beautifully simple flower with the work of doing poetry itself. And in the much more dramatic closing piece, Liberation Day, by J.C. Bloem, we are given a striking panorama of new life springing up everywhere out of the devastation of World War II. Let us listen: