https://martijnbenders.substack.com/p/sara-eelen-wiel-kusters-allard-schroder
This article is based on this Dutch article of philosopher Martinus Benders
The Climate Poet and Other Hobbies for the Empty Heart
https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/02/sara-eelewn-een-man-met-aarde-in-zijn-hand/
How contemptible I find people like Sara Eelen, who add Climate Poet after their name, as if they were appointed by the clouds themselves, as if a flock of geese in perfect V-formation had written their name in the sky with the message: “You, you are the medium of Mother Earth”. What grace. What a calling. What a farce.
And it immediately shows in the wooden, shabby pseudo-poem that these self-proclaimed oracles fling into the world, poetry so dry that even the Sahara would receive a rainfall from it. Take this fragment, clinging to literature like a lost branch:
Dead leaves cling to his feet
bedspread on the forest floor.
In the sun everything withers, including shafted thoughts
also names and species and
And… and… and… Yes, and then? The eternal enumeration, the ultimate stylistic device of the poet panicking to find a message. An enumeration is not a poem, just as a shopping list is not a novella. But sure, it sounds solemn enough to impress the kind of people who think their tearful Instagram activism will one day save a polar bear.
(What kind of brain cramps do you need to find shafted thoughts not a wooden but a poetic word? I don’t know)
The problem with the Climate Poet is not so much that they write about climate – there you could still make something interesting – but that they write with the conviction that their language is a form of moral CO2 compensation. As if the ice caps are less warming from their verse lines. As if a rainworm, deep underground, somewhere between compost and disappointment, squirts a tear at the words shafted thoughts.
But perhaps the worst thing is that this poetry takes itself very seriously. Poetry must do something. It must hit, bite, scratch, at least poke a little. But no: the Climate Poet whispers, cautiously, modestly, in a neatly sustainably produced Moleskine notebook, hoping that someone says ‘beautiful’ in the comments.
(I didn’t read further. Whoever did is lost.)
Next up… Wiel Kusters
https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/02/wiel-kusters-tolk/
He is the classic subsidy poet: a man who, in the right circles, spreads the right opinions, nests in juries and advisory committees, and makes such a deep bow to the ‘canon’ that he constantly rubs his forehead against the shoes of quite mediocre fellow writers.
But let’s not make it too personal. After all, it’s about the poetry, not the man. What does Kusters write in his new collection Don’t Understand Me Too Early? (And let’s be honest, have you ever heard a title that suggests so modestly that the reader will make the mistake, not the poet?)
Here is a fragment of his latest gem:
You say I’m not looking. I’m listening to
an image, to whether and how it speaks to me.
Oh, look, the enlightenment poet is awake. He listens to an image. Has he swallowed LSD? Not just any image, no, an image that wonders if it makes sense to speak to him. So we don’t have just poetry here, but imaginary imagery about imaginary imagery. The kind of language that makes you stand in a corner with an empty canvas in an art academy and cry.
Do you now understand why I stare at you?
Because you ignite in meaning
Here the tragic climax approaches: the poet stares at you because you ignite in meaning. Meaning as a kind of inflammatory phase in the brain, like a malignant tumor. Some self-awareness is not foreign to this official divining rod operator. He just needs to touch the paper, and off he goes:
For if I read you, then I read you too.
This is pure Kusters. A kind of Dinkytoy-Escher drawing in language, where a poet reads a reader while the reader reads the poet who reads him. Poetry as a hall of mirrors for subsidized self-reflection. It’s the type of sentence construction that impresses a cultural committee full of retired literature scholars who believe that a good poet must sound ‘difficult.’
I want to move wildly with my heart now,
Whoever says this out loud in a café gets kicked out. But in Dutch poetry, you can get away with it for half a century.
Wiel Kusters is not a poet, he is an institutional phenomenon, a well-positioned ornamental piece of the literary facade. Poetry for him is not an art form, but an opportunity for official self-observation, an endless stream of semi-profound phrases that take you precisely to the middle of an NRC review, but never further.
Allard Schröder
Link: https://neerlandistiek.nl/2025/01/allard-schroder-land-van-herkomst/
There he stands, the chiseled head of Allard Schröder, stern and serious, as if he could be carved into the Dutch Mount Rushmore of Poetry at any moment. But let’s be honest: if this poem is his evidence, he deserves a spot on a weathered bus shelter along the A7, next to a poster for a sold-out André Rieu tour.
Schröder is the poet of Massive Meaning, the man who with every verse seems to think: This is so grand and profound, they will shiver at the Volkskrant review.
Dear children, all of you
look at the sea and learn to fear her.
This is an opening you can expect from a priest trying to write a sermon in a drunken mood. That ‘dear children’ already feels inappropriately solemn, as if Schröder sees us as a group of six-year-olds in a choir of altar servers. But then comes the sermon: fear the sea!
That’s the tone of this poem: a vague, grand warning, but for what exactly? It never becomes entirely clear. This is poetry that wraps itself in gravity without necessity.
Listens to the ever-muttering water
that keeps washing and washing
and ever-washing gritty sand from rocks grinds
and grinds and grinds and keeps grinding.
Ah, the repetition trick! Writer seeks rhythm – finds typo in his brain – decides to sell it as a stylistic device. What is the function of this piling up of keeps and grinds? Does it create intensity? Tension? No. It’s poetic bluff poker: just pretending something very essential is happening, while the poet simply lacks a synonym.
Then come the sentence constructions that a 76-year-old man dares to attempt without irony:
Lowlanders, litter, migrants,
expelled from paradise, who are the people,
There. Everyone in the Netherlands in one breath reduced to litter and migrants. A biblical curse pronounced from the Cossee throne. The poet as prophet, the readers as wanderers in a world that according to Schröder entirely consists of…
grit, everything is grit, nothing but grit.
Here things get completely out of hand. What is it with old male poets and their obsession with paper shredders? You can already see Schröder before you: a granite head staring sternly over the shoreline, thinking of decay, the inevitable transience of existence, while his publisher calls him to ask why the poetry collection contains exactly 43 instances of the word grit.
And then that closing line:
Let her embrace you in her lap, as if you never existed.
You can already hear the letters coming in: “Mr. Schröder, after reading your poem, I immediately ran into the sea, unfortunately to my knees because it was low tide.”
Allard Schröder is not a poet, but a man who has been writing poetic epitaphs for a cemetery that does not exist for twenty years. And no, that doesn’t earn him a place on Mount Rushmore – at most a weathered plaque on an abandoned pier, where someone once reluctantly cleaned a gritty fish.
Martinus Benders, 09-02-2025