When Language Fails

‘The poem is always a record of failure.’
– Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

A few months ago, poet Benjamin De Roover and I organised an evening devoted to the legacy of Dutch poet Kees Ouwens. During his lifetime, Ouwens, despite his reclusive nature and rather hermetic poems, enjoyed a certain national recognition. Since his death in 2004, however, his work has gradually faded from the collective memory of Dutch readers. That evening, Benjamin and I explored the ways in which Ouwens’ poetry might still be read today, aiming to build a bridge from the past to the present. In addition to organising the event I also participated in the programme. Poet Frank Keizer and I had exchanged a series of emails discussing our experiences with Ouwens’ work and our differing interpretations of it. While Frank focused on the political and societal imagination within the poems, I was interested – an ongoing enquiry – in the corporeal lacunae embedded in his texts. From his first collection Arcadia (Athenaeum, 1968) to his final, posthumously published book Ben jij het, ik? (Meulenhof, 2005), the body plays a peculiar and dominant role: it is constantly being reinvented, reconstructed, always leaving room for error.

This space of fallibility means that the body in Ouwens’ work is always shifting, in a permanent state of movement, impossible to pin down. In my opinion, this stance can be read as essentially queer. In this context, queerness is not merely defined as that which lies outside the heterosexual norm, but also as a sense of deviation, of that which resists containment. Consider, for instance, the opening stanzas of the poem ‘Evolutie’, from Klem (1984):

‘I was a man, but in the sense of //

no more than this signification of words / nor did I dare to periodize / the bodily plasticity in terms of / a development //

the wind expresses a thought which / is that it blows / I hear nothing but the oldest voice of the / world which is that of this / wind //’

In the way the lyrical subject relates to the body, and in this case to gender, lies a twofold distancing from the language used to describe it. On the one hand, there is the awareness that language imposes constraints on how identity can be articulated; on the other, there is the possibility to play with language, to reinvent identity. Not only was he a man – note the use of the past tense – but this being is reduced to a ‘signification of words’. Masculinity is thus not presented as something essential; he was not ‘Born This Way.’ Instead, the assumed stability of the word ‘man’ is rendered malleable, capable of being dismantled and reassembled through language. Later in the collection, in the poem ‘Exil’, he pushes this thought even further:

‘I designed me //

for I mothered the word / suckled the letter / changed the punctuation mark / and potty-trained the word’

These stanzas echo theories of identity as a construction and also give that notion an active twist: the lyrical self becomes a creator, not merely an object of cultural forces. On top of that, it plays with the expected gender roles: despite being a ‘man,’ he is able to nurse the word at his chest. He alters the ‘punctuation mark,’ which evokes the image of transforming a period into a comma – not finality, but the concatenation of meaning. The stanzas from ‘Evolutie’ and ‘Exil’ are illustrative of the way Ouwens, especially in Klem but also throughout his oeuvre, deviates from normative conceptions of gender. More importantly, they show how poetry can serve as a tool to break with constraining semantic frameworks, how language, precisely because of its instability, can become an instrument for re-creation and transformation.

From this vantage point, poetry does not merely represent but has become a performative domain in which identity constantly shifts and destabilises. I want to argue here that queerness – in its most literal sense of deviation, slippage or misalignment – can be read as poetic affect. Put differently, poetry is the domain par excellence where displacement and disruption can become tangible. The tension between being subjected to language and becoming a creator of it forms a key motif here. The poet navigates between language as a constraint and language as a means to liberation, and it is precisely this tension that keeps drawing me back to Ouwens. At the same time, it offers a lens through which to read contemporary poets like Hannah Chris Lomans, whose poetry likewise investigates – and poetically stages – the instability of body, identity and language.

Queerness, in this light, is not simply about being outside the norm. It is a destabilising experience in and of itself, the raw force of existence that grates against the logic of the normative. When I mention queering poetry, I refer primarily to poetry’s capacity to act like sand in the machine, to disrupt the process of normalisation and to truly unsettle. In his book Cruising Utopia (New York University Press, 2009), queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes that queerness is a horizon: a not-yet-born future that hides within the now. Poetry, in this reading, is a way to invoke that future. It is an exercise in imagining possibilities, in making room for forms of being and feeling that move beyond the dominant logic of the present. This renders such poetry not only aesthetic but also radically political. Applied to the social sphere, this means that one of the most transgressive things one can do is to remain in flux, to resist the fixed categories of what ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ is supposed to be. Undermining that binary order is the radical gesture that poetry can perform.

In een lichaam dragen (De Bezige Bij, 2023) by Hannah Chris Lomans, this destabilisation is not only named but physically endured. The work revolves around an undefined body that places itself in shifting relations to its surroundings – a body that one might call, in a Freudian fashion, ‘polymorphously perverse’. Echoes of Ouwens resound in the untitled opening poem:

‘a new word found /
that consumes a stone //

an emptied nest /
in a broken window frame //

torn cloths blow through the streets /
forming ever new constellations //

the ringing is still in your ears /
but beneath it lies silence //

you rebuild relationships /
from your body to the remains /
of this dislodged //

this faltering stumble /
this bronze light /
this stopped drip, source /
that wants to flow out into rivers //

this pain, jagged and open //

you watch the unfolding /
of slow things /
and the landscapes that emerge //’

As in Ouwens, the word here is presented as something capable of digesting even the impenetrable – stone. But whereas ‘Evolutie’ and ‘Exil’ operate through a hesitant, contemplative I, full of semantic sliding, Lomans’ lyrical subject is more physical and the imagery more violent. The poem’s world seems struck by a whirlwind of broken window frames, torn cloth, fragments of something shattered.

In the rubble glimmers the potential for a new beginning, albeit one without redemption. Every new beginning in the poem seems to be painful and arduous. The new body must be assembled from the debris of the old, and no part of that process is self-evident. The remnants are torn from the body; they must be reattached, transformed, inhabited. The image evokes Antonio Gramsci’s famous phrase: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.’ What remains in this interregnum, in the no man’s land between decay and becoming, is the monstrous form – amorphous, misunderstood, queer and therefore politically charged. The question that remains is: who or what gets to decide what a monster is?

This political dimension becomes more explicit in another untitled poem where the tone shifts from lyrical disintegration to eruptive indictment:

‘you apply yourself /
to the actions you have given yourself //

you float but are stuck to the wall //

scorched skin /
half-solidified bodies /
still the threatening expulsion of magma //

anger expresses itself from you /
from a crack but it is not a crack /
just as this wound is not a wound /
and this is an actual existing space fuck het vu /
transzorg nu – the disinfection you long for /
is one of burning the superfluous //

and all the moisture that is in you /
comes out of you, evaporates, the stain /
is not contamination it is life’

This eruptive passage, in which anger presses through the body and language, forms a contemporary response to the existential displacements that were already latent in Ouwens’s poetry. In his work, too, the body is not a closed system but a site of distortion, repetition and detachment – a site where identity must be reinvented through language again and again. His lines from ‘Evolutie’ – ‘nor did I dare to periodize / the bodily plasticity in terms of / a development’ – touch on precisely what Lomans ignites four decades later: a refusal to force the body into a linear narrative of development, and an acknowledgment of language as something that not only describes but shapes, wounds, heals. Where Ouwens unfolds the body’s uncertainty in philosophical, contemplative terms, Lomans tears open the poetic space with eruptions of physical and political violence. Yet the underlying tension in the work of both poets remains the same: how to exist within language that is always infected by norm, expectation, order? For both of them, poetry is not a final form but a process, an attempt, a failed reformulation, and it is precisely in that failure that the queerness of their work resides.

At a time when language is increasingly pressured to be normative, comprehensible and unambiguous, poets like Ouwens and Lomans remind us that its very failure, its inability to provide closure, is its greatest strength. In their hands, poetry is not a confirmation but an interrogation; not a conclusion, but a fissure. In that fissure resides the monstrous, the queer, the not-yet-born – not as a threat, but as a possibility.

All poems in this essay are translated by Lars Meijer