Anthology-Preface: Arthur Bot
Translation: Irini Papakyriakou
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Simone Atangana Bekono, Bernard Wesseling, Kira Wuck, Marije Langelaar, Lieke Marsman, Dean Bowen, Ellen Deckwitz, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Roelof ten Napel, Radna Fabias, Hannah van Wieringen, Hannah van Binsbergen, Maarten van der Graaff
Find the book here
In the report of the jury of the Grand Prize of Poetry (Grote Poëzieprijs), the most important annual prize for poetry in the Netherlands, we read that 150 collections were submitted in 2019 and 118 in 2020: these numbers clearly show that the poetry in the Netherlands is vivid. If we look at the male-female ratio in the submitted collections, we will notice that the majority, around 70%, are male poets. The poetry submitted is very diverse: from lyrical to sober laconic, from abstract to anecdotal, from committed to very personal and from boldly experimental to old-fashioned traditional. Many of these poems are politically charged and, especially in the 2020 collections, we see that the concern about climate change plays a big role. How does this Greek anthology relate to these very general observations regarding contemporary Dutch poetry? Observing the poets of this anthology, we first notice a remarkable difference in relation to the trend of the collections submitted to the Grand Prize of Poetry: in our anthology the male-female ratio is exactly the opposite: out of the thirteen poets only four men are included, ie 70% women and 30% men. This has to do with the trend of the younger generation of Dutch poets, at least of the high level, where we observe a shift in seemingly traditional fashion. As the Dutch poet Alfred Schaffer has already commented: the best poets are no longer primarily whites and men, but people of color and women. Most poets have an academic education, maintain relations with abroad and publish more work.
Almost all the poets of our anthology present and a common theme: the search for a form of identity, both national and personal. Most young poets write about their personal world with their own view of the existence and the universe. The search for their own place within it and their attitude towards the world dominated by the seemingly irreversible neoliberalism and the relevant capitalist system, the automatization and the internet, the social media, the migratory flows, the (sexual) abuse, the problem of climate change, the discrimination and racism, gives birth to poetry that tends to a narrative literature, where lyricism, prose and essay elements work together. A number of poems seamlessly link their theme with the #MeToo and the #BlackLivesMatter movements. Almost all poets write about the process of poetry /writing (processing). We meet the simple everyday language alongside the difficult experimental and hermetic poetry, sometimes even a “new” language, where the Dutch language rules no longer apply. Most of our poets are at the same time excellent performers, who have won awards, for example in slam poetry competitions: this is also demonstrated by the fact that many of the poems in the anthology have theatrical elements and are particularly suitable for on-site recitation in front of an audience. By the way, I would like to invite the readers of this anthology to listen live and enjoy our poets on YouTube!
As already implied above: our thirteen young poets undoubtedly belong to the best of their generation. I chose them primarily for their poems and their literary value. This value has not only been determined by my personal dialogue with their texts, but also by how much they appear on the cultural scene, as well as their reputation, since they have all received many, usually positive, reviews, which were written by the most avant-garde critics and philologists who are often poets and writers themselves. In addition, all poets have won important poetry awards or at least were nominated for them. The poets presented here are great wordsmiths, who often create avant-garde poetry with an amazing wealth of images. All poets, therefore, owe their inclusion in this anthology to the quality of their poems. Although some of them have, in the meantime, published more than three poetry collections or are in their forties, this was not the case when I made the selection at the end of 2018. The anthology does not include poems in Dutch (Flemish) of Belgian, nor in Friesian, which although spoken and written in the Netherlands are recognized as a separate language, nor in South African, a special form of Dutch since colonial times. No attention was also paid to local dialectical poetry. In a series like this, each one deserves its own anthology.
Let us look briefly at our thirteen poets. Commenting on these thirteen outstanding young people of contemporary Dutch poetry, I will try not to categorize too much, because this “classification” of poets would be deficient for these unique artists and the anthologist would pay more attention to himself and his ranking, rather than in poetry. However, to make this introduction more readable, it would be useful to suggest a very restrained thematic selection of our poets. This is not absolute at all, since, in terms of content, all the selected poets have many similarities. The same can be said for the (free) form of the verse in the work of our thirteen poets: and there we can find great mutual affinity in the techniques and figures of speech they use as their form of expression.
All four poets Simone Atangana Bekono, Radna Fabias, Dean Bowen and Kira Wuck are to some extent related with displacement, as well as with origin from immigrant families and dual identity. Simone Atangana Bekono is the most important representative of Afro-European poetry in the Netherlands. The voice that sounds in her poetry is that of the inner world of a black woman, a Dutch woman with West African roots, who struggles with dual nationality and, as she has a feminist orientation, is full of anger when she engages in the dialogue about (sexual) racism, eurocentrism and the ever-increasing polarization of the world that surrounds her. The voice in her poems expresses the oppression of the black body, as well as her childhood memories on the banks of the Dutch river Schelde, her desire for relaxation and vacation, where she can be freed for a while from her black identity. It also invites the reader to think about their own acceptances about physicality. She even writes about the process of poetic writing. So she explores the social imprints around genre, gender, identity and poetic quality and how these elements affect our experiences. With all these she looks combative and tender at the same time, with a steady voice that avoids nothing. Her poems are epistolary and epic, full of coherences, dreamy images and denotative repetitions.
Radna Fabias’s poems also have the origins, the identity and the physicality as themes. With origin from the Caribbean (of the Dutch colony, the island of Curacao) her poems call images from the tropical island. But these are not romantic memories of childhood and nostalgia: all stereotypes about idyllic life and the landscape here are overturned. Other clichés and prejudices are not presented either, as in the case of women and the Netherlands. In Fabias’s poetry we see a committed attitude in the processing of her subjects, such as class discrimination, racism, toxic masculinity, poverty and sexism. Religion (of Caribbean) and superstition are also common themes, as in the poem “Chapter”. She writes poetry about the immigrant, as if for someone who ambivalently seeks a homeland while moving between two worlds. Her poetry is often flirtatious and unvarnished, with insightful, cinematic observations of street life, as in the poem of the anthology about the beaten dog. In terms of form and style, her poems express great differences: short lyric poems alternate with long narrative ones, in which she does not even avoid experimentation. She is constantly trying to express the polysemy and fluidity of our life and thought, while her irony and self-sarcasm make the multitude of topics she wants to talk about lighter.
Dean Bowen, called by critics “a unique and essential voice in Dutch poetry” and a “volcano erupting on stage”, tries, in his own words, to reveal “the universal patterns of our identity”. In this search for identity, he removes all layers to find out what elements have shaped his personality and poetry: his roots from Suriname, the history of this country, his family, his language, colonial oppression, the slavery and the Maroons 1 of Suriname. Dean Bowen channels anger and frustration in his work and so it is just as relevant as the one of the other poets in the anthology. With his poems he takes a committed position in the dialogue on racism and the Dutch colonial heritage, making it painfully clear that the “colonial trauma” is not yet recognized in modern Dutch society. His poems express the movement of a lyrical-personal voice (as in the poem “Denti”) towards a more political collective sound, which shows that the whole society chooses to forget its colonial past and slavery. As a “white” reader you will quickly feel uncomfortable: you can hardly escape the suspicion that you are a descendant of colonial conquerors and slave traders in Suriname and elsewhere. In terms of form, his poems vary: sometimes they look like paragraphs from essays, sometimes they look like letters, sometimes they look like “mindmaps” of all kinds of morphological experiments. Sometimes he uses strange syntax and lines up words that seem to be unrelated. Its language is hybrid and polyphonic: with the frequent use of non-Western words, the use of a language with its own logic and grammar, it seems to free the Dutch from their rules, as in the meanwhile known “mi skin”.
The narrators and heroes in Kira Wuck’s poems imprint displacement and loneliness, but at the same time endurance. The heroes express their longing for communication and intimacy, security and love, while a sense of evil, danger and imperceptible violence is constantly in the foreground. The figures in her poetry look for what their own identity entails and how it relates to the others. This results in the systematic use of the first plural, almost as a linguistic “refuge” in the face of evil. The poet, originally from Finland, demonstrates, on the one hand, a sad universe with Auschwitz, alcoholism (her mother), anonymous lovers, animals killed for their fur, opium, loneliness, beggars without legs and insomnia. But, on the other hand, is the voice of the poet: a shrewd commentator of this world and witty, with her laconic, ironic style, her endurance and the general truths that she expresses objectively and coldly. She mixes the commonplace with the absurd and has a great talent for the effect of contrasts – among other things, in pairs of opposite words – in the use of a language full of amazing metaphors and unexpected turns. With its associative virtual orientation, almost every verse is a new image. And all this without punctuation. Her critics call her magical, reflective and melancholic at the same time. It is not without reason that Kira Wuck influenced other performers and poets of poetry slam.
With Roelof ten Napel, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Hannah van Wieringen we enter another thematic poetic universe: the elaboration of childhood in the (heavily religious) Dutch countryside and the uncertain journey to adulthood and the city. There is also the issue of commitment in these poets, but this attitude has less to do with society as a whole and more with the personal circumstances in which these poets grew up: the environment around them, the faith and customs and the immediate family. The “rebellion” against an overly unfree environment is already evident in the title of Ten Napel’s meticulously crafted poetry collection The Book of Rage. Although this rage is not explicitly expressed anywhere, it is “hidden” in the deeper layers of the poems and in the suffocating atmosphere. It seems to be a helpless rage, as the narrator seems unable to free himself from his hometown (Jaure in Friesland), the past, family customs and God. The subject of rage seems to recede constantly, the moment he wants to approach it (slowly breaks/your backbone […]). The countryside, the strongly religious environment of the reformers and the hypocrisy that accompanies it are ancient themes of Dutch literature. The distance that the poet takes from the church, certainly results from the refusal of this institution to accept his homosexuality. But, as the critics rightly remarked: the poetry collection is not against religion, but remains essentially a religious book. The so-called “wolf” resembles the reflection of the good shepherd, while in more lyrical poems, such as the “song of songs”, where a bodily passion is expressed, it seems that his dialogues with the divine element and eroticism complement each other; a process that strongly reminiscent of the work of the famous Dutch writer Gerard Reve. The poems reveal someone desperately asking for contact. The above mentioned theme is given to us in a language full of religious symbols, in a game with innuendos and enigma. In addition, the poet seems to be a formidable craftsman of sound and rhythm.
Although Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is a completely different poet in terms of style, there are similarities with Ten Napel: in her own poems the narrator also tries to bridge the gap between the present and a difficult childhood in the countryside, which passed it in an orthodox-reformist environment, in North Brabant. She looks both backwards and forwards, towards the (possible) future, as in “New Year’s Eve Channel Island”. The poetic ego struggles with sexual, religious and personal identity and all the uncertainties that entail. The loss of her brother, a frightened mother and a distant father are autobiographical elements that return to her poetry. The girl who sometimes prefers to be a boy, lets through a sequence of people, animals and things. She constantly implies her fear of death and separation and her loneliness. She even seems to be possessed by some fear of what she writes or what she has to write. In pages full of, almost without punctuation, without pause, in which the reader is drawn into the flow of often earthly and raw similes and reflections, it is difficult one to separate the inside from the outside world: imagination and reality touch in an inconceivable way. Everything is charged differently: so the tragic becomes funny and the funny tragic. She tells us so much, with an exaggerated style, in lyrics across the page and, as has been said, with a tidal wave of amazing images, so that, in relation to what she really wants to say, she seems to be playing “hide-and-seek”. However, her poetry is relatively accessible, because it is written in simple everyday language. Dreams and desires are the red thread of the personal content of her poems.
Space and time travel, the dangers of the life of a girl growing up in the countryside and finally coming of age are also topics for Hannah van Wieringen. Just as in Rijneveld, we observe in this poet that imagination often dominates the realistic description, as in the poem “we do not look back”: […] we forgave ourselves our gender and exchanged them with each other […] . We see a girl coming out of her corset in a world full of superficiality and indifference, where the media and the internet increasingly determine everyday life. It presents the life of a young woman with her sexual adventures, parties and uncertainties. She sometimes describes her experiences with “us”, such as on her journey to adulthood in the poem “the seven of us”. Just like in Rijneveld, her often great poems develop into an accumulation of original observations and images, often driven by connotations. Through her poetry she tries, in her own words, to “reveal the incomprehensible secret of life” (why do we exist?), something in which science and religion are inadequate. We see such an example in her poem “about what poetry”. In her best poems she knows how to make the reader completely partaker of the world she creates for herself: then poetry touches life and is completed. Let us read, for example, the poem “In case of love”: a sample of successful balance, discreet enjambments and excellent images. In terms of style it also bears similarities to Rijneveld: in this case too there are clear sentences from everyday language and lack of punctuation. In addition, her language impresses because of its theatrical influence: the use of language is often straightforward, very lively, with sensory power and demonstrates a tendency towards prose, despite her devotion to rhythm and vowel rhymes, as with rhymes of vowels and consonants.
With the next three poets we enter the field of the most socially committed poetry. In contrast to modern Greek poetry, in the Netherlands there is no question of a “poetry of crisis”, which is mainly of an economic and political nature. Nor is there any question of a clear poetry “after the crisis”, which in Greece is called “left melancholy”. But poets Ellen Deckwitz, Maarten van der Graaff, and Hannah van Binsbergen harshly criticize the pursuit of power, the consumerist society, and the social indifference to the problem of climate change. This social commitment, however, does not stand in the way of more personal and autobiographical poems about their childhood and private life. While the poet Ellen Deckwitz in her first two collections approached mainly her painful family relationships, her childhood fears and the difficult childhood, in her latest collection The White Charisma we see the water that comes as a new flood, with references to Hurricane Katrina, global pollution and revelation. In this collection, the family also plays an important role, but the element of commitment in relation to general human behavior is constantly present. The collection consists of five parts, just like the five acts of tragedy. Mankind is being taught a good lesson about its indifference to the environment. After the catastrophe, towards the end of the book, familiarity emerges (again). In all her collections, Deckwitz knows how to avoid stereotypes with original and heartbreaking images and lines. Her poetry is ambiguous: we observe, while our gaze crosses the fringes of the events described, without her to bottle-feed us. Her poetry is elliptical. And it serves all this with the linguistic idiom of everyday life, both with fairytale and with sober, dry lyrics, full of amazing enjambments.
In the poetry of Maarten van der Graaff we find the reference to a person wandering in today’s society. Although his subject matter is partly related to his childhood on the (heavily religious) island of Goeree-Overflakkee in the province of South Holland, his collection The Dead Work is mainly about here and now. With his “lists” and his “timed poems” he mainly chronicles the present. He has also made the passage from the countryside to the city (Utrecht). His poems are often political in nature and very critical of the early twenty-first century, which is being swallowed up by the forms of capitalism that have evolved since neoliberalism. With postmodernism the great beliefs and the Great Narratives had already been deconstructed and revealed as false truths. New forms of commitment should now be oriented more towards a widespread belief than towards the truth. Van der Graaff is therefore looking for an alternative, a variation of postmodernism, as he is now trapped in a capitalist-defined mentality. We are offered a disastrous, unstable and rotten world. His revolution is therefore associated with a feeling of helplessness and misery. This apathy is, according to critic Piet Gerbrandy, also a form of complacency and the collection thus leaves a trace of Sturm und Drang 2. His social critique mixes in content with his inner world, through the search for the self and putting himself in the spotlight as an observer, while not even avoiding elements of mysticism. The narrator, then, essentially presents a form of spleen / ennui in terms of his life, economic reality, and literary avant-garde. With this search for the self comes denial, doubt, and a certain melodramatic attitude, but ultimately liveliness: with all the personal misery and the given political reality, the individual longs for society. The poet’s style, clearly influenced among others by Kirill Medvedev, is short and anecdotal. Improvisational nature and voluntary clutter are obviously tricks. The “timed poems” show seriousness and humor, while sometimes they seem to have been written in a hurry. The (obvious) intertextuality is so obvious throughout the collection that the poems are also a struggle for the (re) definition of writing.
In Hannah van Binsbergen’s collection Evil Star we find both the socially committed theme and the one that is strongly connected to the poet’s personal life. In the first category we observe a critique of market domination in social and political thought and the orientation of society towards it. Her criticism goes so far as to the point to express her desire to turn her back on society. Thus, it automatically ends up with the general theme, which is related to the fact that the desires of the individual conflict with the demands of society. To the question how you live a life in this society, the poet’s voice is obviously anti-petit-bourgeois, against the triptych little house-little tree-little pet. In some of her poems she presents a form of romantic escape: nature as a means to reach (anti-social) freedom. Characteristic are her references to Baudelaire (the poem “Correspondence” from her collection could be a reference to Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances”) and to the romantic painter Casper David Friedrich. But the most important voice is that of herself, about her fears and desires.
There are flashbacks to her childhood, where among other things she describes herself as a “sleepless student”, as in the letter to herself in this anthology. It is no coincidence that almost all poems are written in the first person singular, which is addressed to someone (you or you). We see the life of a girl or a young woman, according to which her body frustrates her spirit and vice versa, especially when it comes to close relationships. When intimacy comes into play, there is always a fear of (the risk of) sexual violence. This dual attitude of both the desire for close relationships and the fear of them, make her vulnerable and at the same time combatively aggressive. Hence the chest in the poem of the title of the collection, where the “star” seems to indicate the inevitability of the threat of her female integrity. Thus, in addition to an “escape” into nature, we see in her poetry an “escape inwards” into her inner world. When she seeks contact, she is at the same time afraid of being rejected, especially because she thinks she knows how others see her, as we see in her (unsent) letters-poems. Van Binsbergen’s poetry collection is a complex and complete entity, due to the many correlations between the poems. She has an unpretentious talent, with which she handles her language material and knows how to adapt it to various semantic layers, which she enriches with humor. Many of her phrases are also read as epigrams or aphorisms that remain in the reader’s memory. Despite, but perhaps and thanks to their complexity, her poems touch you immediately and move you.
In our last three poets, Marije Langelaar, Lieke Marsman and Bernard Wesseling, the critical element is not of course completely absent, but the overall theme of the poems revolves rather around dreams, desires, fantasies, associations and surrealism. Although they are certainly based, in part, on personal memories, their poems create their own fairytale universe. Bernard Wesseling, known as the poet of the stage and slam, called his poems “modern fairy tales for adults”. In a whirlwind of thoughts, observations, memories and events, which usually take place in the capital Amsterdam, we meet a poet who is more of a narrator than a singer or a dancer. Just like Maarten van der Graaff, Bernard Wesseling points out with sharp senses the ambiguities of our time. A theme that comes back to his work is death and mourning, as in the anthology poem “Ritual, intermittent”, in which a girl pretends to be a corpse on the sea. He is a poet who, with sensory visual language, expresses melancholy and satire, reality and dreams, brutality and contemplation and everything works together.
Although death is also a theme in the poetry of Marije Langelaar, in her poetry collection It sparkles we find mainly a vital and physical poetry of nature. Thus it bears many similarities with the important Dutch poet Lucebert and the so-called “Movement of the ’50s”. In her poems she tries to express the forces of nature that play either between people or between people and their environment. The fairytale universe she builds in her work is full of images and figures with which it is difficult to relate: hence the feeling of awkwardness to the reader. In her collection It sparkles the man-woman-child triangle has the central thematic role. The “I” (the woman) seeks union with nature: in the selected poem “Heart” we meet again this attempt, where the “heart like a flower” may depict the “perfect feeling”, the pursuit of freedom and redemption. The most important elements in this collection are united in the poem “Man” of the anthology. The man is unstable, while the child, who needs both the man and the woman, breaks everything that was certain. Her unexpected and sometimes bizarre images are reminiscent of surrealism, a movement that never took root in Dutch poetry. Characteristic forms of the poet’s speech are the transformations, in which inanimate objects and people become, for example, animals and plants. Add the often erratic narrative structures and you will have poetry that goes beyond the laws of logic. The words acquire more meanings at the same time: the poems are ambiguous, but, with their sensory character, they are at the same time recognizable and accessible: thus each reader creates different scenarios with his interpretation.
With all the dreams, desires, fantasies and memories of her faces, Lieke Marsman also creates a personal universe in her poetry. The “man without a hat” from her collection seems to be the male alter ego of the poet. We find this motif of Doppelgänger 3, for example, in the poem of the same name in the anthology. In many of her poems she introduces something that has the effect of alienation on the reader, even though the subject was initially common and recognizable. This element of alienation evolves into its own logic. Besides it also shows great understanding for the reader, who comes together in a world full of humorous fun, but also immersion. On the playful mobilization of philosophical questions she lets associations echo and among the sober findings she disperses astonishing poetic images. She combines apparent contrasts and plays with different levels of consciousness. In addition, she has a strong sense of drama, hence her poetry is often reminiscent of theater rather than poetry. With all these processes, several essential questions are born to the reader, who through the poems is called to think about them. At the same time, in Marsman we find, in the flow of the thoughts of the poetic ego, the contemplation of the self. All the above-mentioned elements of her poetry have led critics to compare her work with the texts of stand-up comedians.
I hope you enjoy the selected poems and get a global picture of the renewed contemporary Dutch poetry!
ArthurBot
Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam
1. Maroons or Bosnegers are called the African descent slaves in Suriname (formerly known as Dutch Guiana), who were liberated and formed their own autonomous communities in duration of colonialism.
2. It literally means “storm and momentum” in German. It is about for the Sturm und Drang school, from the late 1760s to and the early 1780s, which prepared the ground for early Romantic works in German literature and music.
3. Doppelgänger’s motif is often found in literature. The (German) word etymologically means “the one who goes along”, but essentially describes a metaphysical phenomenon of a double (of doubling oneself) or a spirit in the form of one, such as, for example, that of Eleni, who seduces Paris, in the tragedy of the same name by Euripides.