I was born in a war-torn Germany. My grandfather, contemporary of the famous poet Rainer Maria Rilke (whom he had actually met) had been a poet and translator. Unfortunately he died before I was born, but I think he left me through his genes this never ending love of poetry and a talent for languages.


Early on, at around the age of six, I started reading poetry and scribbled my own verses inspired by nature as well as feelings.
I studied for several years at the universities of Madrid, Aix-en-Provence and Perugia and wrote poems in Spanish and French, had many friends among the contemporary Spanish poets and won a prize in a Spanish poetry competition. One of my poems was chosen by the Spanish poet and Nobel Prize winner Vicente Aleixandre and published in an anthology in honour of his 80th birthday.

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  When I later moved to Oxford in the United Kingdom, I first had a love-hate relationship with English, but soon it became a love affair and I wrote hundreds of poems, published some in magazines and books and later joined writers' sites on the internet. Many of my poems were published there.
Even when very young, I had always thought of the poets I read as family, my own kin, who spoke a language I could understand and "feel."
I believe in reading out poems aloud and prefer simple vocabulary. What fascinates me are the possibilities to express feelings. What I respond to is the way a poem can liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seems to me that simple language best suits this; I like scale, but I like it invisible. I love those poems that seem so small on the page but that swell in the mind; I do not like the windy, dwindling kind. back to Meeuws-Hompage >


Scharlie Meeuws