For a while it looked like the king of light verse had stopped writing poetry, but suddenly there is a new collection by Lévi Weemoedt with the promising title: Joy has no hold on me.
If anyone can live up to such a title, it is Weemoedt. The joy may not get to him, but luckily the humor still does. He had already achieved great success with it much earlier, but things turned out well when he was able to promote his work in the TV program in 2018 The World Keeps Turning. As a big fan, TV celebrity Özcan Akyol had compiled an anthology of old work entitled You can learn pessimism! Weemoedt read some verses, after which the reading population of the Netherlands flocked to the bookstore and Bol.com: more than 100,000 copies. This must be one of the best-selling poetry collections in Dutch literature.
Weemoedt then passed through packed halls until corona put a stop to him. It became quieter around him again. Another collection with new work was published in 2019, Health!, but after that he showed little enthusiasm to continue. Illness, recurring depression, it all seemed to be too much, until his friend and (retired) publisher Vic van de Reijt persuaded him to write new work.
Joy has no hold on me has become one of his best collections. It encompasses everything that characterizes his work: melancholy, humor, self-mockery. The poem ‘De kleine Weemoedt’ is one of the highlights of his work. Here he becomes little Ies van Wijk again, as he is actually called.
Like the alarm clock has been set, I think in the evening in my bed:
“Oh, not a day I’m really happy. Have joy no hold on me.
Although I laugh and sometimes even sing, I still feel: sadness is my thing.
Like a duck, swims in water, I am destined for sadness.
Oh, I have since my babyhood of my birth terribly sorry.”
Weemoedt is also good at short, three- or four-line verses. These include discoveries that many comedians will be jealous of. In this I also feel his kinship with Dorothy Parker, the American writer, who once wrote: Men rarely make passes/ At girls who wear glasses. Ivo de Wijs, also novice in this field, translated this into: What men don’t want/ Are girls with glasses.
A recent interview in Fidelity concluded the 77-year-old Weemoedt with the sigh: “But yes, the end is approaching, isn’t it? The grave is yawning. Death is coming closer, so am I in this new collection, yes.”
Time to close with his poem ‘Good understanding’.
As doctors
start about
‘quality of life’,
you only have a moment.
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