Bzzlletin. Jaargang 7

[p. 25]

Bert schierbeek The hunters appetite for victim bait & trap
Paul Brown

A door. An open door. An open door makes space. Space remakes the room without the door - it approaches meaning zero, the great O. The shape of the voice in its Omega - the open door. The world of the voice explodes the system that ‘marks off space’.¹

The ribs no longer cage but cradle. The struggle of the lungs is the rhythm of the word - its articulation in context, in tempo. The body is the limb of the voice, a breathing device that shapes the voice that forms the words, provides the living syntax. The lungs open the door to life, a rhythm we repeat, walking, dancing - prose or poetry. The mother breathes life in the rhythm of labour: the birth of form an exhalation. The vibrant membrane, umbilical language. Cut that cord and the child comes up for air.

Schierbeek is a man who lives to the limit of his lungs, that is no limit but life itself. Indeed, his personal appearance, the device of his body, is nothing so much as a lung with legs, for processing space in its most immediate, accessible form. He is a bellows, an instrument for producing and directing a current of air. Schierbeek, either meeting him, or reading his work (out loud), is an exhilarating experience. I remember trying to match the rhythm and pace of Bert's own reading of his poem on John Akii-Bua² to the assembled pagentry of the Knokke festival in 1974. It is a work of the lungs, as Akii-Buas' achievement itself, that comes with rigid control and endless track practice, neither of which I possessed in rendering the work into the English tongue. Later that night, in the hotel room I was sharing with Bert, who had earlier disappeared to take it out on a dancefloor while I staggered back to the room, I was even more impressed with the image of Bert as a lung - his snoring is trully monumental, as impressive as any poem, even asleep he's ‘running gold’.

Since ‘The Book “I”’, Schierbeek has tried again and again to capture the rhythm of breathing and the shape of the voice on the printed page -

Where the logical line is bound to break down,
the rhythm of the line takes over, the draft of
the breath. Thus do books become respirations
and thereby complexly structured sound unities,
compositions in which man can move freely,
interpreting himself and the world.³

His writing, as his breathing then: organic compulsion. Using not the conventional structures of either formal realism or poetic diction, but the dynamic process of rhythm through respiration which breaks down such barriers, opens the doors, and tolerates a unity which is natural rather than logical.

But this demands a more o/au-ral approach to the subject matter of writing: words - allowing them at one and the same time to be liberated from the subjective constraints of the author and to exercise their own control:

/you're sending up trial balloons in me, swore the man/
and this is Saturn and this is Urban and here is where the Bears begin
/all-of-it is art-in-imagery, kids, said the guide/⁴

The guide here ‘cuts forms up and joins them together / neighbours who hadn't known one another’⁵ - for until that time there exists between them no space to breathe, a kind of Hobbesian state of war where the words as a means of conveyance conflict with words as a means of expression. A will to contend battle for that space of liberation is the old bête noire of poetry versus sense, ‘understanding’ poetry. The trial balloon becoming art-in-imagery. In ‘Pants for an Octopus’, Schierbeek tries to clarify this crucial diffidence between poetry and sense, and poet and audience that Williams mapped out in the Dungeness Crab Problem:

Language is composition, formgiving in words and
not only as a means of conveyance. The poet lets
the words sound and with them the things. He snatches
the things out of their silence and sets to music what
they keep still in utility and servitude. He liberates
them. He makes use of them outside their utilitarian
functions.⁶

It is in the poets ‘score’, in that explosion that precludes uncertainty, that hunter, victim, bait

1 De deur

2 In- en uitgang

3 Een broek voor een octopus

4 De andere namen

5 Een broek voor een octopus

6 Ibid

[p. 26]

and trap become one in principle, or rather appetite. The desire of language to become the language of desire. Before the writer can use words he must first free them from the bondage of not only the alphabet, but also the lexicon. Rhythm as syntax snatches the words from the silence of conveyance, resusitates them with the music of expression, and releases them as meaning to the unsuspecting audience.

As a guide Schierbeek admits a debt to the zen approach, but emphasises that the starting - point must not be confused with the journey. It doesn't determine the trip but rather provides a passport. The writer must become not so much an extraterrestial seer but rather an international citizen, whose preoccupations are the status of -

the empty hand in the eye of a child
that no one ever saw MATTER
the way Maureen Gardner gave birth to her baby
how a glamour girls heart keeps a clean house⁷

The score he composes, the route he maps out is ‘always an arrangement into which more reality can be packed’.⁸ The economy of the voyage matches the notation. Thus Mondriaans preoccupations with jazz, Williams jaggedness and Valérys poetic universe of impractibility find a certain unity in Schierbeeks work. His conception holds together on the premise that this is indeed one world (poi, poi), a world everyone speaks-in (ujamo?), structuring the velocity of experience. Only in such a unity is speak-in possible:

‘we have the same fathers / we have the same mothers’⁹

Poets and writer only borrow words from language,¹⁰ sure, but they keep them till the expiry date is past and their return long overdue. They change them, re-arrange them, add to and subtract from, ‘now minus and just here perhaps - plus’¹¹. Potentialise language by intersecting the syntax - and open the door to meaning. But.

But sometimes they may get stuck. They may never run out, although we fear they may, but get stuck they do. Schierbeeks later work seems to have reached just such an equivocal position. There seems to be a spatial problem with the page and its validity and a fear, perhaps, that he has exhausted his sources and its time to return some of the words to the lexicon -

look
its much worse
than you think
if you think
its even worse¹²

One detects a shift away from the exuberance that characterised his earlier work, towards a hiatus, as if Schierbeek is catching his breath. This stuckness is itself a return to the zen starting-point, whilst the economy is represented in the form his poetry has taken - haiku, and zen exercises of inhalation and exhalation as the titels indicate (‘The Way In and Out’, Running and Standing Still, ‘Falling and Standing Up’).

It's as if Bert has created so much space, the air itself has become rare.

(De citaten zijn van de Engelse vertalingen van Charles McGeehan: Shapes of the Voice, Twayne, 1977)

7 Het boek IK

8 Een broek voor een octopus

9 Inspraak

10 Gysin, Valéry, geciteerd in ‘Een broek voor een octopus’

11 Richard Dadd - The Fair-Fellers Master Stroke

12 De deur