Born 1970 in Utrecht. Poet. First house philosopher of the Centraal Museum (1999-2000) and first city poet of Utrecht (2009-2011). Wrote anti-sports columns for the Volkskrant for two years and columns for the (AD) Utrechts Nieuwsblad for twenty years. Currently works for Onze Taal. Wrote some fifteen books of poetry and is always working on new work. Won the C.C.S. Croneprijs in 2008 for his entire oeuvre and received the Maartenspenning of the city of Utrecht in 2016.
Today I must write about A.L. Snijders, the totally idiosyncratic inventor of the Very Short Story. I have admired his work ever since I discovered it through Vrijstaat Austerlitz (1997-1999), a literary magazine that ran for only four issues. Those are probably the best literary magazines, the fewer issues they cover the better. Arjan Witte and Tommy Wieringa, two of the founders...
'Why I commemorate? Because I am so afraid of what might happen if we forget.' I said this to my iPhone a few weeks ago, relatively happily, on my easy chair in the sun in the backyard. I had a glass of white wine in reach and I was enjoying the suburban spring - a white, content...
The other day I read how a millennial called cartoonist Peter de Wit (born 1958) a "dinosaur" because of a joke he didn't like. The joke goes like this: a woman happily enters psychiatrist Sigmund's office and tells him that she can translate the poem The hill we climb because she is a woman, black, young ánd a spoken word artist. Sigmund congratulates her and...
Big Mouth Billy Bass is a largemouth trout made of plastic attached to a board. When someone approaches - or presses a button - the fish erupts into a gritty rendition of a pre-programmed song, usually Al Green's 'Take me to the river'. At the chorus line, the head detaches from the...
It schmaltzes. It rattles. It is set in Brabant. And my name is underneath it, with 'free to' as a sham in front of it.
'It's really starting to become something with me now anyway,' poems Vrouwkje Tuinman with healthy self-irony in the collection Lijfrente. In her case, you could say that - Lijfrente won the Great Poetry Prize last year. It's a beautiful line, well suited to mumble to yourself on occasion. Too inappropriate is the most fun: you...
It is stupid and pointless to start comparing suffering. There is always someone who had it shittier than you, usually even closer than you thought. But reinforcing the delusion that writers and poets can live off their royalties, when that is literally true for less than one per cent of professional literary authors, shows little empathy.
Since this week, I know the difference between a 12-year-old child and a 50-year-old man. That is, as far as I am concerned. When I was about 12, I demonstrated with my mother against the road through Amelisweerd. It was bliss to walk through town among all those people. A demonstration is a...
I started temp work at a time when you were somewhat of a dickhead if you were a student or had just studied, because the corps ball imitation of Jiskefet was so unprecedentedly popular. So a common greeting among regular employees who wanted to be nice was 'Hey dick! Fucked?'
In the real world there is a second, virtual reality, so multiform, intricate, deep and ramified that you hardly get around to real life when you dive in, but I generally take that second world just a little less seriously.
Virus draws a clear dividing line between those who found love and those who are still looking.
Insayno was city poet for two days - you involuntarily think of that commercial in which a temp says at his grand farewell party, "It was two fantastic days" - and in doing so probably set a record as the shortest-serving city poet in history, with one city poem to his name ("sister of the capital"). What was the problem?
My mouthpiece is non-medical. I like the idea of that. Because as a result, my mouthguard creates a false sense of security. And when I have a false sense of security, I am much more vigilant than with real security.
As a child, I played the piano moderately for years on a large, tattered Kaps from Dresden. The instrument eluded me when I went to college, as it proved impossible to get the thing up the stairs in my first independent home, one of the HAT units in the Boekhoven building on Breedstraat.
The best book I know is called Arthur, King once and for all. That is, that's the name if you buy the latest translation by Jolande van der Klis. Everything you need to know about the world is in this book. It begins like a children's book - I started reading it too when I was a boy
94-year-old Jan Hoek from Rotterdam wrote a letter to the youth that everyone will have read by now - there has not been so much attention paid to a message from an elderly person since that string from Terlouw's letterbox. That message is sympathetic and clear: young people, just hang in there a little longer, for our sake, then you can...
In the second half of the 1980s, when Wim Deetman was still a cheese soufflé and many Utrechters of my age wore kletter vests with broken rifles, it was very easy to know what you were against. This was because of a few clear principles: anyone on the right was bad. Christians were stupid, hypocritical and scary. Anyone who rented real estate...
Over seven years ago, I started as house poet at Sven Ratzke's Late Night Show in Utrecht's Blue Hall. It was a special time. Not for Sven, who probably came into the world singing and wearing designer clothes through a curtain of peacock feathers and imitation ermine fur. For him, the sultry, permanently ramming sold-out nightclub show was cut-and-dried. For...
A school friend was a mountain climber. He was good at it; he never did anything else in holidays. The school friend was tall and so strong that he could pull himself up by one finger. On the first day after the autumn holidays, he told me that another climber in his group had fallen to his death before his eyes. If I remember correctly, he was alive...
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