Poet Babs Gons will be Poet Laureate for two years from September 2023. She succeeds Lieke Marsman in that position, whose term ended in January. That is why the Poet Laureate Foundation, which appoints Gons on the recommendation of a committee of poets and poetry connoisseurs, known this Friday. As Poet Laureate, Gons will act as an ambassador for poetry, among other things by writing poems for national (news) events, which will be published by NRC.
Gons (1971) has been an ambassador for poetry for a long time: her poetry developed on stage, as a performer of spoken word, with which she was loved, much in demand and also acclaimed. This makes her the first Poet Laureate who primarily expressed herself in spoken poetry – although nowadays she mainly writes written poems and poetry also landed successfully on paper in her debut collection. Do it anyway (2021).
In the 1990s, Gons came into contact with spoken word poets in New York, after which she made an effort to get that poetic form more attention in the Netherlands as well. She set up monthly stage evenings in Amsterdam, was co-founder of a talent development and production house for stage poetry, established the anthology Out loud (2018) together, with work by 19 spoken word poets.
Also read this interview with Babs Gons: “Can’t you see those grooves, I’m proud of them”
Language as an inn
The selection committee for the Poet of the Fatherland calls Gons “a poet who knows how to give passionate and committed words to what is going on in our time, in a society that involves her in poetry with conviction.” Inclusiveness is one of the core values of her lyrics: she seeks ‘a language like an inn’, she wrote in the foreword of Do it anyway. Her poetic lyrics act as an embrace: ‘I want a language in which/ ‘ordinary’ and ‘different’/ have had their day/ die a gentle death/ and can never make anyone/ invisible again.’
That doesn’t mean she writes purely pain-free: ‘polyglot’, her Book Week poem from 2021, is about the language of exclusion, ‘The language of head held high and back straight / and pretending / no one can touch you / the language of those who think she doesn’t know she is/ who do I think I am.’ She often writes out of indignation, Gons once said in an interview with Fidelity, “about how people are treated, put away and framed, how they have to deal with prejudices and stereotypes”. The title of her poem ‘Would you like to be black on Wednesday?’ already speaks volumes.
Gons also emphasizes the expressiveness and social applicability of her poems, for example by reprising poems. During the national commotion about sexist excesses in the Amsterdam student corps in the summer of 2022, Gons rewrote her poem ‘Moeders’, about violent men. She provided it with a new beginning for Instagram, fueled by current events: “Every whore that is shouted makes me think of mothers / every sperm bucket that is shouted makes me think of mothers.” The conclusion was identical to that of an earlier version: “I think of mothers who bear sons / who wish sons beautiful lives / and give all the love in the world.” The poem became shared dozens of times.
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