Not a word in his poems was far-fetched or strange, as stated in the NRC review of Hans Tentije’s poetry collection Nowhere else. And yet he also managed to create a certain vagueness in his clear words, allowing reality, dream and imagination to flow into each other, according to the jury that awarded him the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2017. His clear details could make a reverie tangible, said the review of the collection Ground floor. Tentije died unexpectedly on October 26 at the age of 78.
Compliments about the clarity of Hans Tentije’s poetry returned again and again in the five decades in which he published poetry, as did the eye for its paradox. But clarity wasn’t the whole story. Tentije did not play hide and seek, but still managed to capture the suggestion of something hidden; “an inkling of something/ that was too great to comprehend,” as one of his poems concludes.
Hans Tentije, the pseudonym of Johann Krämer, initially worked as a teacher, but since 1985 he devoted himself to poetry. He has published twenty collections of poetry since 1975, the first of which is the title Everything is there had, and the last From where published last year. He wrote one novel, The inner cinema, although you could also call that a collection of prose poems: condensed, musical and consisting of observations rather than stories. He did not become a prominent poet – he was averse to fashions or clubs, wrote in his own way, operated in his own margin. The Constantijn Huygens Prize, which was awarded to him in 2017 for his entire oeuvre, came as a surprise. Hans Tentije’s poetry was praised by the jury of that prize for its “accurate observation, eye for detail and striking characterizations of characters and landscapes”.
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The poignantly glorious
In Hans Tentije’s descriptive, narrative poems he visits places where the passage of time is palpable. He then notes with photographic precision what can be seen and what can be felt. The light, for example, or time: moments that, captured in words, attempt to overcome transience. But the fact that moments are difficult to capture and elusive also creates melancholy in the poems.
Tentije traveled through Europe in his poetry, always receptive to the history that had happened there. He looked at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and mainly saw its faded glory. He saw the ‘death fields’ in Northern France where so much blood had been shed during the First World War. Or he just saw a photo of such a scene and let his imagination do the work. In this way he shows how meaning arises from an interplay between reality and imagination.
Poetry could play a role there: what could not be grasped could still emerge in words. Because ‘ill equipped, you see, in despair, how the real/ and the imagined have become closer and closer/ intertwined with each other and with the sometimes/ so poignantly splendid.’