Ducal

Charles Ducal is a Belgian poet living in Flanders. Ducal was born in 1952, was christened Frans Dumortier, and the poet community knows him as a poet-farmer. Charles Ducal has a reputation for writing shocking, even blasphemous verses. His themes include religion, sexuality and various others. He apparently has a leaning for the controversial.

Ducal’s first poem was ’Het Huwelijk’ or ’marriage’, in English. He was decidedly derogatory about the much-revered institution of matrimony in this work, and he was almost instantly notorious. Ducal’s next effort was ’De Hertog En Ik’, which translates to ’The Duke and I’. The theme of this poem was decidedly metaphysical. In it, Ducal envisioned himself pursued and victimized by a menacing duke. Yet another famous poem is ’Moedertaal’, or ’Mother Tongue’. In this work, he holds forth on the connections between language and motherhood. In the magical connotations that Ducal attributes to language, he is not very different from fellow Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg and the German Rainer Maria Rilke. ’Moedertaal’ reflects Ducal’s belief that language simultaneously defines and repels reality.

In his poem ’Naar De Aarde’, which means ’Towards Earth’, Ducal displayed a political leftist bend of mind ñ this is also evident in the papers he wrote in context with the war in Iraq. Following this work, Ducal did not write again for eight years. After this period, he published a volume entitled ’In Inkt Gewassen’, which means ’Washed In Ink’. Ducal, the inveterate poet-farmer, continues to write captivating and highly eccentric poetry to the present day.