Hans Verhagen

Hans Verhagen (3 March 1939 – 10 April 2020[1]) was a Dutch journalist, poet, painter and filmmaker, born in Vlissingen. He gained the P. C. Hooft Award in 2009 "for his humour, his engagement, his poetic daring and whimsy."[2]

Hans Verhagen
Verhagen in 2008
Born(1939-03-03)3 March 1939
Vlissingen, Netherlands
Died10 April 2020(2020-04-10) (aged 81)
Amsterdam, Netherlands
OccupationJournalist, poet, painter, filmmaker
LanguageDutch
NationalityDutch
Notable awardsP. C. Hooft Award (2009)

Work

Verhagen began writing poetry at the start of the 1960s at the same time as he was experimenting with drugs. He recalls in an interview that "I learned from those LSD experiences. There is an enormous intensification: everything that has been said and done seems to come together in one place, a kind of diamond.” Applying this experience to poetry he "discovered that you could achieve a maximum power with a minimum of material.”[3] The poems themselves are written in sequences made up of short sections bringing in all kinds of contemporary and scientific material:

Ist deformation: war with myself
(images, limbs, letters)
after only 1 second the air-raid warning escapes
- a language according to my syndrome.
After centuries the 1st poem on the radio.[4]

Tongue in cheek, he later characterised such New Realist writing as "full of misplaced symbolism and defective imagery, quasi-mysticism coupled with an abuse of technical terms."[5]

With the appearance of Duizenden zonsondergangen (Thousands of sunsets, 1971) Verhagen shifted into the sentimental mode of the Dutch renewal of Neo Romanticism. From the eighties onwards he confined himself to painting and did not return to poetry until the new millennium.[6]

References
  1. In Vlissingen geboren dichter Hans Verhagen overleden: ‘Zonder overdrijving de grootste dichter van Nederland’ (in Dutch)
  2. P.C. Hooft-prijs naar Hans Verhagen, NRC, 11 december 2008
  3. Ischa Mejer interview, The Digital Library of Dutch Literature 2007, pp.68-9
  4. From "According to my Syndrome", translated by Peter Njmeijer in Second Aeon 16/17, Cardiff 1972, p.78
  5. Forward note to "Cocoon", Stars over Bombay (translated by Peter Nijmeijer), Transgravity Press 1976, p.39
  6. See the article on Dutch Wikipedia
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