Two Dutch poets writing about writing a poem. Easy peasy//tough cookie. Komrij//Achterberg.

THE LANGUAGE-FORGER

Language’s consonants and vowels portray

The corset and the flaccid belly’s spread.

A poet’s one who’s able to display

An ease when boning them that seems inbred.

Obese or slim, his words without delay

Unite, in fluid couplets sweetly wed.

His secret’s effortlessness, not to lay

A smoke screen. He takes language off to bed.

His flask of wine is language - A to Z.

And when half-drunk - albeit just in play -

He spawns a child, an epic or quartet,

Or something in-between - a sonnet, say.

His fight with blubber, though, and whalebone stay

The reader never knows is left unsaid.

CODE

The life force that you formerly possessed

is parcelled out now in the abc.

I fashion from it words that are a key

and open to your death the heavy lock.

In verse it is the figuration: God

that’s made up of the letters g, o, d,

in this set sequence, although not per se,

other formations also pass the test.

Each series, every linking of the chain,

from any language, is appropriate,

provided that its tension is just right.

The writing poet weighs, evaluates,

a deadly skirmish fought with might and main,

until at last the door swings open wide.