Jonas Bruyneel

- Belgium -

Jonas Bruyneel (1989, Kortrijk) studied art history and music production and lives in Ghent. He made his debut in 2015 with the award-winning short story collection Beyond the Light (Voorbij het licht), for which he won the Prose Literature Prize of the Province of West Flanders.

    
From 2017 to 2019, he served as city poet of Courtrai/Kortrijk and curator of the Memento Word Festival. In 2019, he published the historical novel Vijd. Het verdriet van het Lam Gods. (Vijd. The Sorrow of the Lamb of God.) His poetry collection broedland (breeding ground) was released by Poëziecentrum in 2022, followed by Mulhacén in 2024. Together with musicians Klaas Tomme and Esther Coorevits, he created a theatrical performance based on the collection, which toured across Belgium and the Netherlands.
 

In collaboration with visual artist Pieter Jan Martyn, Bruyneel produced the novella Symbols of Democracy (Bruthaus Gallery) and the short film The 12th Monkey (Frank Taal Gallery, Rotterdam). Together with author Hans Depelchin, he forms the performance duo Boonyi. As a musician, he is active with Vincent Coomans, Foutloos, and Philemon. Under his music project momoyo, he released the albums momoyo (2020) and Gaps in Time (2022).


Poetry grows on hard stone. Poems by Jonas Bruyneel
author: Dirk De Geest / translation: Poëziecentrum

 

Jonas Bruyneel is, despite his youthful age, a writer of many talents. In addition to his literary pursuits, Jonas Bruyneel is involved in various music projects and theater productions. In this sense, he is a typical example of the contemporary artist who refuses to be confined to a single genre or medium and aims to reach as broad and diverse an audience as possible.

Bruyneel made his debut in 2015 with a collection of short stories Voorbij het licht (Beyond the light), followed a few years later by a historical novel, Vijd (2019), about the patron of the legendary medieval painting The Ghent Altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers. In recent years, he has focused mainly on writing poetry. After serving as city poet of Kortrijk, he made his poetry debut with the Ghent-based Poëziecentrum with the collection broedland (2022). Two years later came Mulhacén, a long narrative poem. Each time, Bruyneel also transformed his poetry into a performance: for him, poetry is more than printed words in a limited edition.
 

broedland (breeding ground) – intentionally spelled without a capital letter – is a tightly structured collection, composed of five sections of ten poems each. Every individual poem functions as part of a larger whole, with recurring imagery and motifs that echo like musical themes with variations.

Thematically, the poet attempts in his debut to define himself more clearly as a subject in space and time. What’s striking is that Bruyneel does not approach this as an anecdotal autobiography, as many of his contemporaries do, but instead chooses evocative imagery that enhances both the intensity and symbolic nature of his universe. Literature creates its own world.
 

From the outset, the poetic "I" inhabits a kind of "borderland" between here and elsewhere; the collection bears the traces of numerous journeys both domestic and abroad. It is precisely this liminal space that allows for sharp observation by combining the perspectives of outsider and insider. The lost rural landscape of youth is poetically imagined, but the memories are at once disorienting and, at times, downright frightening. They circle around a deep desire to escape and disappear, often accompanied by a certain aggressiveness. At the same time, they are frequently associated with decay and death—experiences that make the protagonist feel especially fragile and vulnerable. The broedland (breeding ground) is anything but an idyllic environment.

The present is equally unsettled. Both at home and abroad, moments of harmony and purification are rare. The poet is often in conflict—with himself, with space, with time. This constant unrest is threatening, but it also keeps the poet alert in his existence. In this way, he arrives at a deeper analysis of himself and his surroundings. Actions and bodies are transformed into rituals, and the landscape takes on cosmic dimensions. The “I,” by contrast, is portrayed as an insignificant link in a much larger cosmic framework—one that includes not only personal family history but also the history of the earth, its fauna and flora. Even the most intimate moments with a loved one are marked by a sense of fragility, struggle, erosion, and loss. Life must be claimed in the face of these imperfections, day by day.
 

The collection Mulhacén also expands the scope of everyday life to ask essential questions. This time, the poet journeys through southern Spain with the modernist poet Federico García Lorca, from Granada to the highest peak in the region, Mulhacén. Naturally, this is an imaginary encounter—Lorca died long before Bruyneel was born. Rather than a historical reconstruction (though Bruyneel’s research is thorough), the poem is a symbolic journey between two kindred spirits.

The Flemish poet wanders like a contemporary pilgrim through a land that appears to him mainly foreign and exotic. He travels past villages and rivers, meets people with their customs, and is overwhelmed by sensory impressions—intensified by the harsh Spanish light and the stark landscape. Beyond the visual stimuli, sounds, scents, and colors are evoked in a lyrical, hymn-like way. Internally, the speaker undergoes a transformation that heightens his awareness of his surroundings and sharpens his perception of even the smallest details. He is struck not only by the insignificant and the hidden, but the entire reality becomes imbued with meaning—filled with rituals and symbols.
 

Crucial to this psychological transformation are the many conversations with Federico Lorca. The historical poet often speaks directly, sharing his views on literature and the world. He serves both as a mentor and as a sounding board for the hesitant young poet. Lorca reflects on the role of the writer in a world becoming increasingly problematic (marked by the rise of a totalitarian Spain, homophobia, and the shift from an agrarian to an industrial, opaque society). He questions the real impact of literature but remains aware of the writer’s vital responsibility. In this way, he acts as a model for the contemporary poet, who seeks a balance between romantic sensitivity and social engagement. Gradually, the two protagonists become mirror images of one another, as the historical conditions of the interwar period and our own time prove to be strikingly similar. Even Lorca’s obsession with doom and death captivates the young poet, but it is above all the writer’s vital engagement—his desire to stand firmly in the world rather than retreat into an ivory tower—that resonates most strongly.
 

The existential tension between life and writing is made tangible in this contemporary parable. In Mulhacén, Bruyneel opts for the form of the narrative poem, which is consciously more accessible than the lush broedland (breeding groud) of his debut. Moreover, the poem is written in the copla form—the traditional Spanish folk stanza of four lines with eight syllables each. In this way, apparent simplicity and complexity go hand in hand, resulting in poems that do not readily yield their mysteries on first reading. The reader, like the searching poet, is expected to be attentive and active.

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. Lanjarón – Bubión / Lanjarón - Bubión

  2. Pitres – Trevélez / Pitres - Trevélez

  3. Campiñuela – Mulhacén / Campiñuela - Mulhacén