Poetry Is Personal Common Property

One year after publishing her first book of poems, De Aantekening (The Note; 1978), Gerry van der Linden left the Netherlands for the USA. For the next four years, she lived and worked in New York and San Francisco. During that period, she read with Alan Ginsberg, met Laurence Ferlinghetti and continued to write and develop as a poet. A few years after returning to the Netherlands, she published her second collection, Val op de rand (Fall on the Edge; 1990). Certain characteristics of her later work emerged here: a playful yet passionate approach to language, a keen eye for the absurdness in our daily lives, a thematic preference for travelling, love and family.

“I write poems that arise from looking around me,” she explained in a recent interview, “What’s happening around me and beyond gives me an idea, a thought, a question, a feeling of discomfort and anxiety. I have to do something with that, just as I have to breathe to live. It’s a need to capture and show the essence of anything in its own universe. A universe which I continually adjust and extend with a kind of language that’s often at odds with the concrete experience.” This approach to writing, to language and to life is consistently displayed in her poetry, from Aan mijn veren hand (At my Hand of Feathers; 1993) and Zandloper (Sandglass; 1997) to Uitweg (Way Out; 2001) and Goed volk (Good People; 2004). With each new collection, Van der Linden needs to renew, or even reinvent her tools and material, her language and vocabulary, in order to maintain some grip on reality. The first nine poems from the cycle ‘Rumoer’ (Bustle), taken from her collection, Glazen Jas (Coat of Glass; 2007), offer a fine example of the struggle with reality in which Van der Linden is engaged. She depends solely on her words – along with her sense of humour, that is – to describe, but also to tame the world around her.

In 2012 the collection Wat een geluk (What happiness) was published, poems full of fresh views on the absurdity of every day’s life. In her collection Stadswild (City’s prey) 2014, startled the critics by its; ‘poetry as it is drawn in the air, showing us the outside world penetrating our inside, if we like it or not’. In Verse helden (Fresh heroes) 2017, she shows her most developed skills in mastering the language in matured subjects like living to the edge with death on your heels, death itself and cherishing life in all its daily facets. In the latest poetry book Niemand blijft het langst (No one stays the longest) 2021, her poems are like hymns of rhythm, breathing in, breathing out, full of life, hope and awareness of the vulnerability of human and nature.  

Van der Linden teaches Poetry and Creative Writing at the Amsterdam School of Writing (Schrijversvakschool) and is a personal coach for (aspiring) writers. From 2005 until 2008 she was a member of the board of the Dutch PEN Center and took care of the WIPC (Writers in Prison Committee). For years she is a respected member of The Dutch Writer’s guild, committee of Literature. Alongside her twelve collections of poetry to date, she has published three books of fiction. She also works as a visual artist, makes collages and creates installations of leftover materials.