Ars Poetica

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
— Bertolt Brecht

Ars Poetica is an evening of inquiry. Not into what poetry is, but into what it does, when the world burns, bends, and breaks. How does poetry respond to the world in which it is written and re-written? This an evening about staying with the trouble, and from there imagining otherwise.

The evening is co-funded by the Lira Fonds and supported by the Network for Environmental Humanities at Utrecht University, with thanks to Mia You.

Juliana Spahr presents her latest collection, Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), a radical reworking of the classical tradition. Instead of a singular, authoritative statement on poetics, Spahr gives us seven poetic meditations that fragment and recompose what an ars poetica might be in an age of ecological collapse, surveillance capitalism, and resurgent authoritarianism.

Exploring the domestic as resistance, Maarten van der Graaff reads from his latest collection Huishoudboekje van de verborgen dingen (2025). Can we see the hidden, secret, or unspoken, not just as something to uncover, but as a way of understanding the world? Graaff‘s work poses a central question in late modernity: What does it mean to care when the future is unequally distributed?

After Juliana and Maarten, three Dutch poets will respond to Ars Poeticas, opening up to a dialogue instead of a conclusion:

• Saskia de Jong’s sharply associative poetry refuses transparency, dwelling instead in ambiguity, contradiction, and linguistic estrangement. Language, in her work, is not a vehicle but a battlefield, a site where meaning is simultaneously made and unmade. Her poetry destabilizes meaning, exposing cracks in the symbolic order.
• Çağlar Köseoğlu‘s poetry has often focused on moments when history shudders and new futures become briefly imaginable – or on what happens in the aftermath of such moments. In his last poetry collection, Nasleep, he blends Dutch, Turkish, and English phrases, dismantling language hierarchies while also building a layered and multilingual form of resistance. Köseoğlu is currently working on a poetry project titled onze liefde is terroristisch, in which he is writing for the end of this world.
• Pelumi Adejumo works at the edges of grammar and genre. A multidisciplinary writer, performer, singer and lucid dreamer, Adejumo approaches language as both wound and balm. Adejumo’s graduation book soms ik voel mij zombie inhabits the broken grammar of migration, where Dutch and English meet Yoruba rhythms. Her work is bodily, rhythmic, and unsettling. Her poetry explores the hauntedness of language shaped by migration, ancestry, and translation.

Together, the evening asks how poetry resonates, ruptures, and reimagines. The question is fundamental: What can poetry do in dark times?

The evening is hosted by asha karami and will be conducted in both English and Dutch. Parel Joy and Eddie Azulay will be providing some translations for the evening.

About Ars Poeticas

During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht‘s question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song’s possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with and to each other, but what they might yet do together.

About the speakers

Juliana Spahr is a writer and scholar of literature. Spahr has published nine books of poetry, the first in 1994. Her poetry book, That Winter the Wolf Came (Commune Editions, 2015), takes as its concern the global spread of political struggles located at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. It was listed in The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2015. She has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been rewarded the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Ars Poeticas (2025) is her most recent book of poetry.

Saskia de Jong is a poet. She was nominated for the C. Buddingh‘ Prize for her debut, zoekt vaas (2004). Her second collection, resistent (2006), also received praise. She received the 2007 Gedichtendagprijs and was nominated for the Paul Snoek Prize. In her collection De Deugende Cirkel (2010), De Jong humorously describes the animal kingdom from A to Z in poems for children. Her most recent collection, het jaagpad op en af, was published in 2020. In 2021, she received the A. Roland Holst Prize for her entire oeuvre.

Maarten van der Graaff made his debut in 2013 with Vluchtautogedichten. In 2014, this collection was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize. In 2015, he published Dood werk, his second collection, which was awarded the J.C. Bloem Poetry Prize. In 2017, his debut novel Wormen en engelen was published. In 2020, he published the poetry collection Nederland in stukken. His second novel Onder asfalt was published in 2022. Huishoudboekje van de verborgen dingen is his latest poetry collection, published in May 2025.

Pelumi Adejumo is a runaway pastor child, writer, (vocal) artist and lucid dreamer. Writing on/with migratory grief, African/Black Pentecostal music and alienation. She uses glossolalia, unintelligibility and linguistic plurality to open up disruptive and rhythmical possibilities. She wrote soms ik voel mij zombie, a text exploring multilingualism in grammar. She has a BA in Creative Writing and an MA in Fine Arts. Her thesis explores the relationship between Yoruba praise poetry and the concept of àṣẹ; how these influence the understanding of language and the role of a poet in creating and archiving cultural identity. She has written essays on visual art, language and artist books, performed at festivals, and lectured to students about poetry, identity and transdisciplinary methodologies. She is a programmer at the international literature festival Read My World.

Çağlar Köseoğlu’s poetry has appeared among others in nY, Samplekanon, De Internet Gids, Cabaret Wittgenstein and Social Text. His chapbook 34 (2015) is both an anti-history of Turkey and an abstract elegy for a group of Kurdish border traders. His poetry collection Nasleep [Aftermath] (2020) takes the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a point of departure and explores the remnants of that historical moment, oscillating between polyphonic, critical noise, and post-revolutionary affects. Köseoğlu teaches at the Humanities department at Erasmus University College, at MEiA at the Piet Zwart Institute and at Critical Studies at the Sandberg Institute. Currently, he is the poet in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.