In February 2025, the new issue of Schrijven Magazine is released, featuring an interview with Rozalie Hirs titled “I Speak to the Reader with Affection” by Henry Sepers. The article will also be available online. In the interview, Sepers speaks with Hirs about her poetry collections ecologica (2023) and dagtekening van liefdesvormen (2024). Hirs shares, among other things:
“Ultimately, poetry always comes down to meaning. That matters and has to be right. And that meaning develops gradually during the process of writing and reading. Of course, one has certain beliefs, experiences, and memories that shape what and how one writes. My poems are meditations, a flowing thought, a stream of consciousness, full of shifts in perspective. They are also a kind of self-investigation that comes from letters and diaries. In my case, often a wish surfaces. I speak to the reader with affection. I’ve been doing this from the very start, since my first book.”
“dagtekening van liefdesvormen from 2024 and ecologica from 2023 belong together like day and night. ecologica is about concern for the world, the ecological crisis, dwindling biodiversity, global warming, vanishing resources – in dagtekening van liefdesvormen, I reflect on my own life: how has it been so far? And then, the common thread within all my experiences with people turns out to be love. The collection is about transformative and defining experiences that have made me who I am. And love is always a part of that. For me, love is a state, a way of being, or an attitude of myself. I always see possibilities in people, also in language and text. The entire collection is an investigation. A meditation on different ways of being and becoming in the light of love. Love is the focus in this book.”
“The book is a kind of network of experiences and memories. Each poem relates to a special experience. The places serve as markers here. For example, the small beach at Blijburg is a marker for my recent move to IJburg. The poems may function like parallel worlds that exist simultaneously in our memory. Often, it so happens that we can remember something better when the memory is linked to a special or new place.”
“If I hadn’t also been a composer, I wouldn’t have been able to write these poems, and vice versa. The two disciplines nourish each other. Language has a rhythm of successive meanings and an intrinsic melody, which I have called ‘rhythm of meaning (or semantic rhythm)’ and ‘speech melody’. I work with these, very intuitively. Both can be related to the heartbeat and to breathing, just as we relate rhythm and melody in music to our own heartbeat and breathing. As both a composer and poet, I am looking for music and poetry with exactly the right balance between surprise and expectation.”
“I’m deeply interested in the cosmos, yet especially from a scientific point of view. I’m curious about the world around us, its people, psychology, language, and music. I want to understand how things work. There’s, indeed, also a lot that we don’t yet know or can’t know, but we have the desire to know more and explore, and that fascinates me. My curiosity and wonder always win over, for example, the fear of the unknown. In my life and poetry, I’ve embraced vitality.”
Read the full interview in Schrijven Magazine, available from February 2025 at better bookstores or online at Schrijven. The photo of Henry Sepers above was taken by Elmo Nijhoff.