Young poets, packed houses
By Tatjana Daan. They were on either side of forty, the poets who passed for the 'young guard' of Dutch poetry in the mid-eighties. Huub Beurskens, Willem Jan Otten, Robert Anker, Anneke Brassinga, Stefan Hertmans, Luuk Gruwez, Charles Ducal. For many years they had been regarded as the newest generation of gifted poets. But in the late nineties things began to change, and today's 'young poets' are no longer in their forties, but in their twenties and thirties. Continued...