This article is based on this Dutch article of Martijn Benders
Today, Dylan Thomas and Hans Faverey. The rest you’ve imagined yourself.
I readily admit I have a trauma related to eierkoeken. Yes, indeed, eierkoeken: those spongy abominations of consolation and self-deception. A mirage of air and sugar, a sad imitation of anything once worthy of the name “cake.” The color of yellowed wall paint, the texture of a worn-out bath sponge, and the taste… that taste! What follows is an experience tantamount to licking a dusty windowsill in an abandoned house.
In our cupboard, which my grandfather had built himself in the shed—he constructed my parents’ entire setup and it still remains there. And there was always one of those cheap plastic bags with eight rock-hard eierkoeken inside.
Later on, when I occasionally bought a Dutch poetry collection, I often thought back to that bag. Those collections were usually eierkoeken in literary attire. Every letter expertly placed, but oh so dry and sterile. Reading through an entire collection in one go felt like trying to consume eight eierkoeken in one sitting, without water nearby. Each dry bite followed the next, and soon you were trapped in a kind of literary suffocation. The poems, like the cakes, seemed to be meticulously measured by hand on a scale for precision, but without any trace of liveliness or playfulness. Every time I opened such a collection, I felt that same paralyzing disappointment: no juiciness, no explosion of flavors, only the empty promise of something that should have been poetry.
And now you often see this on a stage with bells and whistles and confetti, but if you look and listen closely, you’ll understand: the blame does not lie with these poets. No, they are merely the product, the flat product of an eierkoeken audience!
The tragedy of our time is not the impoverishment of poetry itself, but the fact that all this happens in the service of a mass that has deluded itself into believing that this is all poetry has to offer. The audience has rewritten the rules of the game. The audience sets the standard, and the standard has now become a dry piece of cake that never satisfies, but this dry dissatisfaction is sold as contemporary crumb-collecting art.
But the poets, you’ll have to imagine for yourself.
Yours sincerely,
Martinus, 13-10-2024