Tomorrow will be Monday for everyone

Wheel Kusters

In May 1940, the poet Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923-2014) is sixteen years old and writes his first poems. Six years later and a world war later, without even realizing it, he is on his way to becoming one of the most influential Vijftigers. The Second World War, that great deformer of man and morality, made him the poet who later preferred to write 'men' rather than 'me' and who, until his death in 2014, has become one of the greatest Dutch poets of the twentieth century. century. In his acceptance speech at the 1989 Prize of Dutch Literature in Brussels, he spoke of the years 1940-1945 as a 'school that taught me that words are empty shells if they are not filled with your own life and body, your own mortality.' Tomorrow is Monday for everyone. The period of the occupation and the first years after the war are highlighted in an extremely fascinating way, when the poet is employed as an art editor for the communist daily newspaper De Waarheid. The story is interspersed with numerous previously unpublished poems, story and letter fragments.