Maud Vanhauwaert may be renowned for being an award-winning poet, but she describes herself—rather prosaically—as someone who is ‘professionally struggling with language’. Her struggle got rather official at the beginning of this year, when she became Antwerp’s City Poet Laureate. Using the city as her laboratory, she is on a quest to take poetry beyond the boundaries of paper.

Poetry is born from confusion, according to Maud. Confusion she willingly creates herself by addressing unsuspecting passersby with the question ‘Shall we wait?’ – and other lines of her poem ‘Wij zijn evenwijdig’ (‘We are in parallel’). With reactions varying from ‘Which summer?’ to ‘Mine are grown already!’, unexpected new dialogues begin.

As an investigator of our daily struggle with language, Maud also questions how we ask questions. She has recently created an updated version of the ‘Guess Who?’ board game, with characters that transcend the gender binary. After all, the game’s classic opening question—‘Is it a man or a woman?’—doesn’t cover the broader M/F/X gender spectrum.

With over 170 nationalities living in Antwerp, language is becoming a struggle for all its inhabitants. Tapping into that evolution, Maud has launched Radio Babel. Participants are invited in her little tower of Babel to read a poem in their mother tongue. On radiobabel.be, you can listen to recordings of their performances. It’s a fast-growing collection of border-crossing poetry, because this Babel Tower is reaching for the sky.
—Mike Beyers