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Gerrit Komrij
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Donation by the Vereniging Vrienden van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek
Acquisition 2004
Date 1963
Size 24 x16 cm.
Signature 2296 F 99
Over the years, the poet Gerrit Komrij has gradually released a small selection of the poems he wrote during his youth. He occasionally publishes them in a bundle, or sometimes they turn up at second-hand bookshops. At a sale exhibition commemorating Komrij's sixtieth birthday in 2004, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek was able to purchase his first independent publication Dekonstruktie in vier delen [Deconstruction in four parts].
Komrij often implies that he discovered his characteristic style as if by a bolt from heaven, but in fact his poetry travelled a long and winding road from pastiches and eulogies through experimental poetry to his familiar form of twelve rhymed lines. More than fifty percent of Komrij's poetry uses this form: usually three couplets of four lines each, but in this proto-debut he used four three-line couplets.
He continued to experiment from this publication until his official debut in 1968, including the long poem 'Mijn minnaars' [My Lovers]. Many of these are very personal and intimate. These experiments were later intentionally kept outside the Komrij canon. Komrij claimed - incorrectly - that he finished this pamphlet at the age of fifteen, several months before his first publication in the school newspaper (on Multatuli, May 1960).
It resembles a cheap mimeograph copy, but the text was printed with hand-set type in a print run of around twenty copies by the printer Holders in Winterswijk, sometime around Christmas in 1963. Six months earlier, Komrij had left Winterswijk and moved to Amsterdam to attend university.
Big-city phenomena such as frikandel snack sausages, art houses and car tyres only began to play an important part in the poems he wrote in Amsterdam. These poems, which were printed in his home town, do not deal with the Big City, but with farm boys maltreating frogs and with a trip he made to Switzerland with a boyhood friend. The world described in Komrij's poetry from this period is surprisingly broad: from braised steak to phalluses, from violets to decaying chicory, from temperament to giro bank accounts, no aspect of life is too insignificant to be included in his poetry. This aspect of Komrij's poetry has been underemphasised until now.
(PVC
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