The Rotterdam poet Hans Sleutelaar (84) died in the presence of his daughter Nadia on Thursday evening. He was not very well known to the general public, but he was influential in the circles of the Sixties – Armando, Vinkenoog and Vaandrager. Van Sleutelaar’s famous sentence is: “Wollt Ihr die total Poesie?”
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“Rotterdam shaped me, as a person, as a poet,” he said in an interview with NRC four years ago. “We were young, we wanted to make something, find a place. Our opponents were the Vijftigers, who were all in Amsterdam. We were here where there was nothing.”
“Rotterdam is a no-nonsense city. That echoes in the poems we wrote. Clear language, compelling rhythm. We had a different relationship with the word than the Vijftigers, we wanted to restore the everyday to the business. Rotterdam , the dynamic, the saying-where-it stands on – these are things you can stick on my poems. ”
“It must be good”
Sleutelaar was co-founder of the magazine De Nieuwe Stijl, wrote for the Haagse Post and was editor-in-chief of publisher Boelen. He wrote about sixty, seventy poems. To Rijnmond, in 2016: “I work slowly. It has to be good if I want to call it art.”
That same year, Sleutelaar was awarded the prestigious Anna Blaman Prize. In one of his favorite poems, the Maas and the Hef figure:
Clouds float over eel-colored water
The light shines just like then, but later
De Hef watches over this grim life
I turn dizzy. And shudder for a moment.
Café Himmelreich
The key-holder lived abroad for a long time. He returned to his hometown Rotterdam five years ago. In recent years, he suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
Last spring he featured in a documentary series by Stephan Warmenhoven and Carel van Hees on the local channel Open Rotterdam.
“I hope there is a heaven where Jules (Deelder, ed.) Awaits him at the gate,” said Van Hees in a comment. “That they take a gin & tonic together in Café Himmelreich and see the earthly existence far from above.”
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