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Article Excerpt
Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers, The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the Twentieth Century, Volume 6, edited with an introduction by Peter Glassgold; revised and expanded, with a note, by Douglas Messerli. Green Integer, 289 pp., $18.95 (paper).
Greetings: Selected Poems, by Hugo Claus, translated by John Irons. Harcourt, 131 pp., $23.00 (cloth).
Living Space is one of the most exciting anthologies that I have ever read. It is full of compelling, funny, unsettling, challenging and formally innovative poems that should deeply impress English readers, though for the Dutch this provocative writing indeed springs from over a half-century ago. De Vijftigersbeweging--"the Fiftiers' Movement"--was made up of Dutchmen and Flemish-writing Belgians who were born just after the First World War or in the 1920s and who burst onto the literary scene after the Second World War, that is, during "the grand spree of/Liberation" when, in the words of the ever-frank Rem-co Campert (b. 1929), "water turned into whisky" and "everybody boozed and fucked, / all Europe was one big mattress / and the sky the ceiling / of a third-rate hotel."
This describes some of the ambience--rowdy, Brueghelesque, inebriating both physically and intellectually--in which the nine poets featured in Living Space came of age, though Campert also mentions a "year of the strike" whose "consequences still / are with us." Several poems by the Fiftiers accordingly point to hardships, uncertainties, and false illusions, while others celebrate sudden freedoms, pleasures, and possibilities, namely that of writing an "other" poetry, as the philosophically alert Gerrit Kouwenaar (b. 1923) phrases it. For him, new-found literary liberties motivate a quest of the "poem as object," of which he gives this, among other quiet, vivid examples: "a glass revolving door and the chinese waiter / returning steadily with other dishes." Other samples of his lexically straightforward, gently bizarre, and thought-provoking poems reveal his suspicions about "naming," "experience," and "reality"--which he declares is "no island," an intriguing transformation of John Donne's famous apophthegm. Like Kouwenaar, all Fiftiers are occasional philosophers in poet's clothing (though their outfits differ significantly from one to another), and they specifically dabble in philosophical anthropology. "Man hardly knows what man is," remarks Jan G. Elburg (1919-1992), "the poet knows all about nothing." In...
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