FRANK KEIZER

Frank Keizer is a poet, essayist and editor based in Amsterdam. He is the author of two chapbooks and one volume of poetry, ‘Onder normale omstandigheden’ (Under Normal Circumstances), published by Polis in 2016.
He works as an editor for nY, a Flemish literary journal, and as a publisher ofcontemporary innovative poetry at Perdu, a poetry foundation in Amsterdam. His poems have been translated into English, French, German and Portuguese.

TERMS

commoning
squatting
hacking
striking

NEW ECOLOGIES

COMMONING

Commoning implies a gesture towards a 19th century process called enclosure. Enclosure was a process of expropriating land that was commonly used by the people and making it private property. Nowadays it would be good to reconsider the communal quality of the land and think of ways to re-appropriate the land in which we live, in which we produce and in which we reproduce. We should claim some of that wealth back, so the environment would become a terrain of struggle and the model for political struggle would become the process of commoning. 

URBAN ASSETS

SQUATTING

Urban assets or housing would be a second terrain of struggle. Housing used to be a much more evenly distributed asset in cities and has now been rapidly privatized, especially here in Amsterdam where the large-scale privatization of social housing is going on. One of the ways in which this can be countered could be based on examples from southern Europe, where people take back houses, through a process that might sound a little cliché or old fashioned. I think squatting is still a very useful strategy for re-claiming what used to be affordable housing and which, through a process of financialization, crisis and austerity, has been removed from the people to whom it once belonged. 

DIGITAL TOOLKIT

HACKING

The notion of a digital toolkit could be re-phrased into another struggle around information, and the ways in which information is becoming a commodity. Personal information is commodified through techniques like surveillance and big data, which create new ways of governance. One way of taking our privacy back is, for example, through hacking, a way of freeing information from the hands of private capital, the capitalist class, and turning it into an open source, a communal source.

NEW COLLECTIVES

STRIKING

Social reproduction is a concept that addresses the ways in which labour is not just something that happens in spaces that we think of as productive, like factories or even offices, but also in the broader social environment. Labour used to happen not only in the home but also in social spaces. This is work that is very productive, invisible and absolutely vital to the sustenance of the whole society. If cleaners would go on strike and put down their work, they would show the impact of their work on the general functioning of economy, thereby showing its value and importance. I think it is important to consider this dimension of social reproduction, work that is being done by people who are usually marginal in an economic sense, in terms of wages, but are providing vital services. A strike could demonstrate the importance of that work. Other types of work should also ally in order to create better working conditions for everyone. This would be a new form of collective struggle, pertaining to a terrain that is thought of as neither political or economic, but which is in fact very economic and important in the public sense. 

 INTERVIEWED BY 
ANIA MOLENDA

In searching for a new vocabulary Frank Keizer calls for not divorcing terms from practice - from actual struggles. In doing so, he has identified terms that roughly relate to four terrains of struggle and spoke to us about the political relevance of culture and its language.

 AM: 
Is there something that you think characterises contemporary vocabulary and is there something that we should change about it?

 FK: 
Contemporary vocabulary is marked by crisis, and not just in the pervasive rhetoric. Our whole thinking and speaking about society is defined by the word ‘crisis’, also in the sense that crisis has become a very ordinary state. This is also evident by this project - UrgentCity. It alludes to something not being like it used to be, or like it should be, and in a sense that this is a state that should be addressed and dealt with. I find this is a useful way of thinking about the present. Perhaps crisis should even be seen as something that we can think with and not simply against. Crisis shapes the way in which we act, so instead of restoring some earlier state of affairs, we can maybe develop a vocabulary in accordance with the present and use it as an instrument to create new concepts. 

 AM: 
Is there something that you think characterises contemporary vocabulary and is there something that we should change about it?

 FK: 
Contemporary vocabulary is marked by crisis, and not just in the pervasive rhetoric. Our whole thinking and speaking about society is defined by the word ‘crisis’, also in the sense that crisis has become a very ordinary state. This is also evident by this project - UrgentCity. It alludes to something not being like it used to be, or like it should be, and in a sense that this is a state that should be addressed and dealt with. I find this is a useful way of thinking about the present. Perhaps crisis should even be seen as something that we can think with and not simply against. Crisis shapes the way in which we act, so instead of restoring some earlier state of affairs, we can maybe develop a vocabulary in accordance with the present and use it as an instrument to create new concepts. 

Contemporary vocabulary is marked by crisis, and not just in the pervasive rhetoric. Our whole thinking and speaking about society is defined by the word ‘crisis’, also in the sense that crisis has become a very ordinary state.

 AM: 
This project is about communication, we ourselves have experienced a lot of moments in which we were either misunderstood, or inspired by, a different meaning that derived from a different discipline or culture. Do you have any anecdotal stories where you either felt completely misunderstood or when you heard a different interpretation of your poetry that inspired you and opened up new perspective?

 FK: 
Sure it happens a lot. I think a lot about the way in which I use the term autonomy mainly as a political concept, for example, autonomy from neoliberalism, from state, from market. However in my discipline, literary studies, I have seen it used to refer to the autonomy of the artwork in a very formalist sense. So the overtones were much more aesthetic and less political. This happened often during my studies, when a lot of the discourse was about aesthetic autonomy and political autonomy was not really something that was thought of. Then I went to Kosovo with a group of autonomist people, to organize a festival in Pristina. There we discovered that autonomy meant something completely different than in the Netherlands, even within activist circles. In the Netherlands, it is used to think about new ways and spaces that are not controlled by the market, whereas in Kosovo it was much more entrepreneurial and meant autonomy from the NGO’s. For example it reverted to any kind of non-state run cultural activity and it was informed by entrepreneurialism, which we were very critical about. This has probably to do with the different histories, but it inspired me to take into account that the word autonomy could actually mean something very different, even within the progressive circle of activists, so my understanding of the term was enlarged.

 book 
ONDER NORMALE OMSTANDIGHEDEN 

by Frank Keizer

 AM: 
The latest volume of your poetry is titled ‘Onder normale omstandigheden’ (Under Normal Circumstances). What is for you the notion of normal circumstances and what is the notion of crisis? 

 FK: 
The title connects to my earlier statement that crisis has become normalized. In contemporary life it is pervasive. It is not a traumatic moment per se, but something that happens continuously and saturates everything. My point was that the whole temporality is in crisis. We don’t have a sense of collective struggle anymore or an aim towards a common future. There is a crisis of historicity, the famous end of history, which of course wasn’t an end in any sense. History didn’t end but there was a crisis in the sense that there were no perspectives anymore that could be called ‘collective’. That was what I was interested in: re-discovering some forms of possible collective endeavour. Of course, the word ‘normal’ in the title suggests that those circumstances have never actually been normal. I don’t think it is possible to go back in any sense. Circumstances have always been like this, and this was something that I tried to find a language for, some kind of idiom about a present that is saturated by crisis. 

 AM: 
Do you think that poetry has a certain political capacity? We seem to live in a time where there is a lot of political disengagement. Do you think that by being a poet and addressing this with your poetry, you can stir that up? 

 FK: 
It is indeed a time of political disengagement and I think my poetry very much testifies to that. But I also see it as my role as a poet to be attentive and responsive to the present. To cultivate this attentiveness to the world as it is presented and to how it could be changed, is a profoundly political attitude. One of the things that poetry can accomplish is to find a language for this world we live in and that has political consequences. In the Netherlands, being a poet is regarded as a private affair that has nothing to do with society. I disagree. I think the poet should not adhere to this cliché of a private individual only interested in his own feelings. I am interested in feelings if they are shared, and I hope to voice some of that in my poetry, thereby contributing to a language of shared feelings. I don’t think that it can be directly political. I think that political organizing is indispensable, and remains so, but as a poet you can be part of that.

I think the poet should not adhere to this cliché of a private individual only interested in his own feelings. I am interested in feelings if they are shared, and I hope to voice some of that in my poetry, thereby contributing to a language of shared feelings. 

 AM: 
On the one hand, poetry is very open, but it is also considered quite elitist. So how can such a medium reach the masses? Can you find a balance between the language of reality TV and poetry, which is considered part of higher arts?

 FK: 
I think poetry as we know it today might be considered elitist, at the same time it is not generically so. I think poetry is a very democratic way of expression. Historically, it is even one of the most accessible ways of expressing yourself. You don’t need much. You don’t have to be rich to be a poet. You can do it when you don’t have a lot of time. So I don’t think it is a historical necessity, but I do think it is institutionally this way at the moment. I hope this can be changed, and it slowly will. Poetry can still have a wider audience but the term ‘mass’ is maybe not the most suitable term through which to talk about poetry. Maybe instead of talking about mass aggregation, like in the case of a stadium or the TV, we should talk about intensities.

I think poetry is a very democratic way of expression. Historically, it is even one of the most accessible ways of expressing yourself. You don’t need much. You don’t have to be rich to be a poet. You can do it when you don’t have a lot of time.

 FK: 
Poetry can lead to a more intense way of engaging with each other and with language, and this could spark even larger intensities and spread out. Perhaps poets should also collaborate with people more, using language that is everywhere of course, even poetic language is everywhere. Not expropriating it, but really using it together. That could be interesting. I try to think of ways to make poetry more collaborative and open, not just formally but also socially open, even though poetry will never be a mass activity. 

 AM: 
So, no reality TV for poets?

 FK: 
No, no reality TV for poets, but a better reality maybe?