'The Last to Leave'

Pam Brown

Dirk Van Bastelaere (Photo by Krystof Ghyselinck, 2005)

In 2005 Tony Frazer's UK-based press, Shearsman Books, published a selection of poems by Dirk Van Bastelaere. They were translated from Flemish by Willem Groenewegen, John Irons, and Francis R. Jones. Dirk Van Bastelaere is a postmodernist. I read the book, The Last to Leave, and found its polysemy and pace enthralling. To me these poems seemed made by an intertextualist in pursuit of the limit-experience. Here was a poet who was unfastened and fast. He was influenced by John Ashbery and by Gertrude Stein, and often referenced contemporary art and culture - films, pop songs, literature and so on - an aspect that apparently led to his being attacked for "intellectualism" by critics in Flanders.

In 2008 Dirk Van Bastelaere caused some controversy in the Flemish poetry scene with Hotel New Flanders, a large anthology of sixty years of Flemish poetry that he co-edited with Erwin Jans and Patrick Peeters. His poetry operates in flux and it seems that he sees anthologies similarly. He wrote in the introduction to Hotel New Flanders:

"A hotel is a transit zone with many different rooms. For many poets staying at this hotel is temporary and they will, as time passes, be booked into another room. It all depends on the stars in ever-changing constellations twinkling in the sky. "

Dirk is working steadily on a new book of poetry, and spending a lot of time working on Alphavillle, a platform for poetry, literature and cultural criticism in a multimedia environment. Most of the posts are in Dutch, but essays in English, German, French, Spanish are also welcome. The site was launched in June last year, and is aiming to become international.

At the time of Dirk Van Bastelaere's publication in English in the UK, Karlien van den Beukel edited 'Low Countries', a feature on Belgian, Dutch and Flemish poetry for Jacket, issue 31. Karlien now works in creative Writing at London South Bank University. In 2010, two poems by Tonnus Oosterhoff translated by Karlien appeared in Jacket as an extension of the Low Countries project. She continues to translate this poet's work.

Karlien van den Beukel included a selection of poems from The Last to Leave in 'Low Countries' -

http://jacketmagazine.com/31/nl-van-bastelaere.html

And Andrew Duncan reviewed the book. Here is the link -

http://jacketmagazine.com/31/nl-duncan-dvb.html

February 11, 2012

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A decade and a half ago, in the mid-1990s, I was participating in a global transformation at my day job at a sciences library at the University of Sydney. Librarians were retraining - shifting from card catalogues, roneodex, microfilm, and crowded rows of books and journals into the technological world of digital media for most of their classification and reference material. Electronic articles and online journals were evolving and becoming the norm. I undertook courses in computer data referencing, electronic cataloguing, web site construction and so on.

In early 1996, having learned the basics in a training tutorial at the library, I downloaded The Bare-Bones Guide to HTML from the internet and began, painstakingly, to make my web site. I searched for any Australian electronic literary journals (web-zines) to create links to and found only Gangway– a bi-lingual (German-English) quarterly edited by Sydney-based publisher Gerald Ganglblauer. (Gangway continues to publish many Australian, European and American writers.) Later, in October 1997, John Tranter started an online literary journal called Jacket, edited from his study, upstairs at the rear of his house in Balmain. John invited me to contribute poems to several issues, and then, in 2002, to guest edit a feature in tandem with the print journal, Overland, where I was the poetry editor. In 2004 he invited me to guest-edit issue 27 of Jacket and then asked me to join him in editing the magazine.

Here, I'll be presenting some of the highlights from my time as associate editor at Jacket the first.

Pam Brown edited a feature of recent (and ongoing) contemporary poetry and visual art for Jacket2 - Fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia. Her most recent book of poetry is Authentic Local (soi3 modern poets) and another, a pocket sized selected, Anyworld, is due in early 2012 from Flying Island. She lives in Alexandria, Sydney. Visit Pam's website and blog.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

Posts

Two poets who write about art

New Russian poets

'The Last to Leave'

With James Schuyler — three editors

Find the nest where freedom had no paper works

An interview with Lionel Fogarty

Mina Loy

Three Egyptian poets

Fluking it, with Chris Edwards

Mister L.D.

Jacket the first

'The Last to Leave'