I’d said that anyway

A prolific drinker and an even more prolific writer, Pfeijffer has written novels, essays, plays and song lyrics, while simultaneously becoming one of the Netherlands’ leading contemporary poets.

Pfeijffer is a seasoned performer with great stage presence who likes to provoke. He posed naked on the back of his collected poetry from 1998-2008, The Man of Many Ways, and is quick to air his views in his newspaper column, often stirring up new controversies or deliberately making enemies. Running through his entire oeuvre are questions of authenticity and fantasy, imagination, romantic love, sexual failings, nostalgia, and identity. A commonly posed question is ‘How to live’. Pfeijffer has a wide range of styles and registers, combines high and low and is fond of hyperbole. The poet has a strong sense of comic timing and knows when to use the bathetic or the obscene to good effect.

Pfeijffer’s background as a classicist is more than apparent in his poetry, yet he is fond of drawing from modern life too. Computer game avatars, erotic comics and television programmes feature in his work, alongside barbarians, witches, pirates, princesses and other mythical figures. In his latest poetry collection, Idylls, he found new energy in a combination of a complex classical form – rhyming alexandrines – with accessible, narrative content. The rise and fall of the verse gives the poems a hypnotic power, while the repetition of a running motif ‘de nacht is aangezegd’ (the night has been announced) affords a dark suspense.