Poet
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Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer 1968-... country: the Netherlands language: Dutch |
Publications (selections): van de vierkante man (1998). (1968) made his début in 1998 with a collection entitled of the square man, a literary multi-course dinner which made a splash in Holland’s quiet poetic pond. Fifty-odd highly individualistic poems: a sturdy volume which at once won him the 1999 C. Buddingh’ poetry prize. Pfeijffer is exuberant, energetic, brimming with life. His banquet serves the reader no white lines of silence, no regular rhyming stanzas. Pfeijffer likes to break bones, throws in a ‘ha ha kiddo humour joke’, jabbers extravaganza and toasts ‘to a dangerous glass’. His free verse, without capital letters, throbs and sings with alliteration, internal rhyme and associative sequences like ‘dram dromende druilknol knoestig knort’. Its overwhelming dynamism, its lavish exploitation of sounds and words, take the reader as by storm. ‘Words must give you something to chew on,’ says Pfeijffer in an interview. ‘There is plenty of ordinary speech around.’ Apart from a poet, Pfeijffer is a Greek scholar on the staff of Leiden University. He wrote a dissertation on the poetry of Pindar, but also published a history of classical literature for the ‘general reader’. Regarding his own poetry he has outspoken views, not just in his often quoted programmatic opening poem ‘Farewell Dinner’, in which he dismisses the hermetic Hans Faverey and calls for ‘butter-baked images / and bulimic verse’. Pfeijffer’s poetic polemics leave no room for doubt as to what kind of poetry he prefers. He feels akin to Lucebert, and abhors the paper verse of introverted hermetics and meek-hearted dreamers (‘stumble, stiff romantic, mumble on’). Poetry should have life, and preferably, in Lucebert’s words, ‘life in full’. Thus Pfeijffer, the ‘gleaner of contrivances’, quotes not only Pindar and Pound, Horace and Lucebert, Sophocles, Walcott, Gorter, Faverey, Nijhoff and Reve, but also comic book characters. He not only writes about the political martyr Ken Saro Wiwa, but about C&A sweaters and Fiat Croma, barcodes, canned beer, butt-tight and garamond ten point italic. The poet neither lacks humour or self-mockery, nor seriousness for that matter, witness his hotly tender love poems: 'and though I sang and gave over my loins / and you failed to scorch my senses / I should be useless white on white.' Author: Mirjam van Hengel Poets: |
