Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (born January 17, 1968, Rijswijk), Dutch poet, novelist, polemicist and classic scholar, was born in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, now lives and works in Leiden.

Biography

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer made his début in 1998 with a collection entitled "Of the Square Man", a literary multi-course dinner which made a splash in the Netherlands’ 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 Ezra Pound, Horace and Lucebert, Sophocles, Derek Walcott, Herman Gorter, Hans Faverey, Martinus Nijhoff and Gerard 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.'

Criticisms

Works

Poetry

*Van de vierkante man, 1998
*Het glimpen van de welkwiek, 2001
*Dolores. Elegieën, 2002

Prose

*Rupert. "Een bekentenis" (novel), 2002
*"Het grote baggerboek" (novel), 2004

sources: http://www.boekboek.nl http://www.kb.nl/dichters/pfeijffer/pfeijffer-lit.html

Essays

*Het geheim van het vermoorde geneuzel (essays), 2003

External links

*Pfeijffer's Web Page [http://www.iljapfeijffer.nl]
*"Ilja Pfeijffer, aka Ilja Pfeiffer, the most important poet from the Netherlands", satirical website [http://www.epibreren.com/pfeijffer/english.html]
*Quite comprehensive bibliography (same website as above) [http://www.epibreren.com/pfeijffer/bibliografie.html]

Articles

*Article on I.L. Pfeijffer at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (in Dutch) [http://www.kb.nl/dichters/pfeijffer/pfeijffer-01.html]

Online poems (with translations)

*"en wat het dan betekent"/"and what it means" [http://netherlands.poetryinternational.org/cwolk/view/16491]
*"Een Corinthische ode"/"A Corinthian ode" [http://netherlands.poetryinternational.org/cwolk/view/16495]
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