Metapoëtiese raakpunte in die poësie van Gerrit Kouwenaar en Breyten Breytenbach

Abstract

Prompted by the poem "brief in een fles voor breyten" in which a certain poetic relationship between the Dutch poet Gerrit Kouwenaar and the Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach is implied, the author of this article traces the outlines of a meta-poetics common to both poets and through which their poetry has intertextual links with the poetics of among others Poe, Mallarme and Wallace Stevens. The following common denominators are found in Kouwenaars’s body of works and Breytenbach’s ("yk") and Lewendood: the proliferation of the subject, the ‘killing’ of life in language, the extended metaphor of food, eating and excretion and the living poem as a present absence.