My interest in the Dutch “Fiftiers” culminated with a large anthology of their poetry published in the Green Integer PIP Series in 2006. For this volume, I started with the original anthology, edited by Peter Glassgold, of Living Space, published by New Directions in 1979. Working with Glassgold, I expanded the original grouping of poets by two authors and included a wider selection of poems by each author, publishing alongside the English translations the original works in Dutch. We reprinted Peter’s original introduction, which began with an encounter with a young Dutch student on a train who found it amusing, evidently, that Glassgold would be translating Dutch “poetry.” Glassgold sees this as a sign of cultural disdain of any language community conscious of its isolation that is often a natural reversal of the “will to survive under the fortuitous siege of history.” My own note to this volume continued from this discussion.

Since Peter Glassgold’s 1979 Introduction to his Living Space anthology—with its statement of being the “first major collection of Dutch poetry to appear in English”—there have been at least five other such anthologies, a couple of them incorporating poems published herein.*

All of these volumes have added to the English-language reader’s understanding of what can now easily be perceived as major contributions of the Dutch to modern and contemporary poetry. But the attitudes surrounding this and other poetries in translation have not, alas, greatly altered since Glassgold’s prescient and somewhat humorous recounting in this original introduction. One need only consider the continued attacks by some of the few remaining Yiddish writers against the contributions of the internationally beloved Isaac B. Singer and the New York Times Book Review’s diminution of the importance of and outright dismissal over the past few years of figures as important to American poetry as Ezra Pound** to remind one of the cultural self-disdain of the young Dutch student with whom Glassgold spoke in 1977.

Moreover, Dutch poetry, I am afraid, has not made great inroads upon the consciousness of English-language readers. As I write this, I just got off the telephone with one of the most noted of contemporary American poets, a writer highly interested in international poetics, who, when I told him what I was writing, admitted that he had never before heard even one name of the Dutch Fiftiers included in this volume. Through Charles McGeehan’s tireless efforts, there are some sophisticated readers who may know the writing of Bert Schiebeek, and, through his fiction, a number of English-language readers may know of the Flemish writer Hugo Claus; but very few readers in this country, Canada, Britain, Australia or New Zealand know of the astoundingly rich poetic output of Lucebert, let alone have ever heard of Remco Campert, Jan G. Elburg, Gerrit Kouwenaar, Sybren Polet, or Simon Vinkenoog. Most of these writers are not even mentioned in the encyclopedic American reference books such as Contemporary Poets or the Encyclopedia of World Literature. The globalism which most countries are portrayed today as having embraced seems to exclude poetry and—by ex-tension—most languages other than English.

And even here, in a country devoted to its own global priorities and the power they seem to evoke, one can only admit that we share the same self-defensive dismissal of our language as the young Dutch physics student encountered by Glassgold. At least he knew who the Dutch Fiftiers were—they were poets! and therefore of little interest to him. I suggest that one would have to ask several hundred students aboard any Amtrak train before anyone could identify Charles Bernstein or Lyn Hejinian, for example, as poets—which, given the 25 years since their original publications, puts them in a position quite similar to that of the Dutch Fiftiers in 1977.

Within this context it seems almost ludicrous to republish—let alone to expand and add to the original Dutch poems—a book such as Living Space. To me, however, it is an act of faith, an almost Kierkegaard-like leap into belief that there are readers out there, like myself, who will come across such a book and discover in it, as I did in the late 1980s, a whole new world of possibilities, comprehending, as Gerrit Kouwenaar has expressed it, that in art there are choices:

I propose to open the door, discovering what is there, outside of oneself!

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*The most notable of these anthologies is Dutch Interior: Postwar Poetry of the Netherlands and Flanders, edited by James S Holmes and William J. Smith and published by Columbia University Press five years after Living Space. Two years earlier, in 1982, City Lights published Nine Dutch Poets. In 1988 the Australian literary journal Posst-Neo published, in a staple-bound, Xeroxed book, Naked Poetry: Dutch Poetry in Translation, edited and translated by Cornelis Vleeskens. In 1997 Modern Poetry in Translation devoted its 12 th issue to Dutch and Flemish writers, including some work of the Fiftiers. Princeton University Press published Landscape with Rowers: Poetry from the Netherlands, translated and introduced by J. M. Coetzee, in 2003.

**In a review of the Library of America’s edition of Pound’s Poems and Translations (February 1, 2004) reviewer David Gates wrote: “Compared with equivalent stretches of ground-clearing and throat-clearing by Frost or Yeats, little [of Pound’s poetry] remains readable. This is partly because, thanks to the modernist emphasis on subjective experience, poetry has largely come to mean their sort of post-Romantic personal lyric.”

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Los Angeles, December 13, 2005

Reprinted from The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20 th Century, Volume 6: Living Space—Poems of the Dutch

Fiftiers (Los Angeles: Green Integer/EL-E-PHANT No. 6, 2006) and Jacket, No. 31 (September 2006)