Levina van WINDEN
We are all either in Prison
or on Stage
‘Neu Stammheim—[no fishing]—long live the RAF—in solidarity!’
— Prison Complex Bijlmerbajes (1978)
[possibly the oldest graffiti in Amsterdam still standing]
I sometimes sing lest you forget who I am. Or we throw a thousand tulips in the canal in your grandma’s resistance uniform—you the jacket, I the skirt—to show her who we are. To show each other who we are.
We always know precisely who we are but sometimes we need to press it through the paper with precisely the right words or precisely the right amount of soaking tulips, like you did with a thought on the back of a golden chocolate wrapper.
Nobody will ever keep us from the stage again.
Sometimes you meet these people you can fully get to know with one good look.
Sometimes it only takes a single deed one single moment to never have met a certain someone.
Sometimes it doesn’t take recidivism to deny any and all ties.
Sometimes ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’ are only standing in our way.
Ulrike Meinhofs brain was confiscated by the state.
NSDAP Member No. 9154986 cut it out of her skull.
They kept it in a cardboard box ’till 2002.
Jurisprudence.
Nobody will ever tell us if the terrorist nature can be dissected.
Formaldehyde.
Sometimes we don’t have to forgive anything
Sometimes we have to hold everything briefly,
shine a light, squeeze it softly for a while
Sometimes a thousand tulips aren’t enough
to forget everything for just a while
We will throw the flowers back at the crowd.
We always know precisely who we are but sometimes we need to press it through the paper with precisely the right words or precisely the right amount of soaking tulips, like you did with a thought on the back of a golden chocolate wrapper.
Nobody will ever keep us from the stage again.
Sometimes you meet these people you can fully get to know with one good look.
Sometimes it only takes a single deed one single moment to never have met a certain someone.
Sometimes it doesn’t take recidivism to deny any and all ties.
Sometimes ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’ are only standing in our way.
Ulrike Meinhofs brain was confiscated by the state.
NSDAP Member No. 9154986 cut it out of her skull.
They kept it in a cardboard box ’till 2002.
Jurisprudence.
Nobody will ever tell us if the terrorist nature can be dissected.
Formaldehyde.
Sometimes we don’t have to forgive anything
Sometimes we have to hold everything briefly,
shine a light, squeeze it softly for a while
Sometimes a thousand tulips aren’t enough
to forget everything for just a while
We will throw the flowers back at the crowd.
Levina van WINDEN is a poet, theorist, militant, hysteric, and so forth. Now living in Amsterdam, she was born and raised in a little old town at the center of the Scheldt river delta, one metre below sea level. With an anglophile linguist (former new wave bassist and singer) mother and an astrophysicist sysadmin (former punk roadie) father, Ms. van Winden was destined to end up as a ‘Philosopher-Poet’—and thus, not long after obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, she took up the art of poetry. Van Winden became Amsterdam’s 2018 performed poetry champion while testing the strength of her art on the stage, and as soon as she was satisfied with the results, she signed a book deal for her debut, which was published by Atlas Contact a year later. This poetry collection, titled Er is een band die rapemachine heet (There is a band called rapemachine), came hot off the press last January ’20—and like radioactive matter, it’s not about to cool off.
See https://levinavanwinden.nl.
(author portrait courtesy of Menno van Winden)
See https://levinavanwinden.nl.
(author portrait courtesy of Menno van Winden)