J. Bernlef and American Poetry: Poetic-Strategic Mentions of Marianne Moore. A Case Study

Abstract

At the end of the 1950s, Dutch writers made an appeal — with a Dadaist gesture — to close down museums and destroy works of art. The statement by Armando, Hans Sleutelaar and Cor Vaandrager was aimed at bourgeois art which they renounced as elitist and pedantic. Following in the footsteps of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters from the Dada movement, the neo-Dadaists wanted to eliminate the dividing line between Art and non-Art in the 1950s and 60s. Art was thus assigned a critical role and formed part of everyday life. Since contemporary avant-garde artists in Western Europe focused on reality and shied away from anything that was aesthetically pleasing, they are referred to in history of art compendiums as new-Realists. In the visual arts, the terms ‘New Vision’, ‘zeroists’, and ‘nouveaux réalistes’ were also used. During the period of neo-Dadaism and Neorealism in the literary systems of the Netherlands and Flanders, emphatic reference was made to contemporary trends on the American artistic scene. Accordingly, Andy Warhol’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art can be seen as an offshoot of Dada. In the 50s and 60s, Dutch new-Realists made references in their paintings and poetry to the collages of Pop Art and the concomitant critical attitude towards consumer society. The Flemish artist Pol Mara, for example, joined forces with new-Realist poets in Flanders and was unquestionably indebted to Pop Art for his painting technique. The links are not just in the visual arts. In poetry and poetic texts, too, there are many references to contemporary American literature. In their explicit-poetic collection Een cheque voor de tandarts (1967) J. Bernlef and K. Schippers mention Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters (Zurich Dadaism) as spiritual fathers of their modernist art conceptions. The poems of, inter alia, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, too, were seen as exponents at the time and were translated by J. Bernlef into Dutch in that period. In this paper, I want to consider the Newrealist trends in Dutch literature and more particularly in the collected poems and poetry translations by J. Bernlef from the perspective of the explicit links with American modernist poetry. Mentions of Marianne Moore in Bernlef’s poems and essays is the aim of my research.