Olivier Faivre is a French expatriate living in the Netherlands. A physicist by training, he is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the Open University. He reads and writes in French, German, Dutch, Spanish and English.
You can read your isla bonita is my liquid soliloquy in the July 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
Call it escapism but it was a depressing winter evening and I felt like writing about warm summer days. I wrote a few poems as I scrolled through holiday pics on my phone. This particular picture —our three-year old son running on the beach— was taken on a Spanish island and the island gives this poem its mood.
I do this often —pushing off from a photograph, as it were. Poems start with images. Then it’s a slow swim through words.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
Somehow, I always come back to Rimbaud. In fact, there’s a line from Le bateau ivre smack in the middle of this poem. There’s also a line from Tristram Shandy. I love Tristram. “Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?” Such a blast to read!
Here I want to segue into Cervantes and Rabelais and more, but we were talking about poetry, so I guess I’m off-topic already…
How do you revise your work?
Relentlessly. I mean, repeated passes. I make up new rules every time, then break them. It’s all a game of make-believe. Allude, delude, elude, illude…
It’s fun but it’s hard, too. It’s like climbing a mountain: in the end, it comes down to grit. (Of course, looking back it was just a hill.) I try to be patient.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
When the poem assumes its own voice. In fact, I’m starting to think that all my poems are persona poems. The good ones, anyway. The poet as both ventriloquist and audience of one… I’m talking to myself.
When a poem is successful, I read it and I’m having fun reading it and re-reading it. That’s all. I’m not proud or possessive about it. It’s like when you’re having a great dream. You’d never think “What a good dreamer I am!” No, you stay within the dream and enjoy the (inner) ride. Yes, I’m a lucid dreamer. Anyway, that’s success for me.
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
Dutch contemporary poetry! I especially like Lieke Marsman. Also, I still read scientific papers —I used to be a scientist— and that gives me a lot of creative energy.
What are you working on now?
I have a bunch of poems, some published some not, that I’d like to compile into a chapbook. But I’m hard at work on (what will hopefully become) my debut novel this year, so poetry has to wait, unfortunately.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I just read Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk and it’s brilliant.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
Here’s what first come to mind: Can we ever know what we directly experience? Or only what we have reconstructed in our mind? Or: Is “craft” nothing but such a reconstruct? Yet, poetry is the surest way I know to evoke those pre-word thoughts… It’s confusing. I guess our mind is mostly good at fooling itself. The mind as columbarium —here’s how I picture it. All those tiny niches!