Wijnand Steemers 2021

Herenstraat 12
6701 DK Wageningen
wijnandsteemers2009@live.nl |

Wijnand Steemers (1947), poet and painter, editor, ancient bookseller. Jan Hanlo encouraged him to keep on writing poetry. Advices of Theo Sontrop. First appearance in De Gids (1969). J.C. van Schagen, Gerrit Komrij, Laurens Vancrevel responded positively to his poems. In 1976 he was a participant in Poetry International, Rotterdam. His work, although indebted to Surrealism, occupies an autonomous position within the poetic tradition. It evolved from Surrealism to…Subrealism. Author of more than 25 poetry collections, including Toegiften (Leiden, 2016), The Milkmaid, 30 poems in Dutch, translated by Ada van Meijeren, with 30 surrealistic collages by the Canadian painter Gregg Simpson. Steemers has translated poems by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke and by some old Chinese poets. Prose: the long essay Het Blinde Zienerschap (The Blind Visionary, 1996), Stuifmeel (Blütenstaub, Pollen), fragments of the philosophy of Novalis (1995), Poëtocratie (Poetocracy, 2006), Ja, Ick Wil, or the Mowingfield, a philosophy of the Scythe, an so-called anovel (Yes, Ic Will, 2018).

Many of his works as a painter have been exhibited in France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Wageningen. The paintings have been sold to Germany, Danmark, Hongkong, China, Switserland, Canada, Spain. Two pages for the section Dutch Surrealism appeared in the American annual Hydrolith 2: Mosquito Prayers: a manifesto, and poems (2014). The poem Niets, Nothing has been published in the translation of Ada van Meijeren in CEQUI SERA, International Almanac of Surrealism, for surrealism is still world wide current and vibrant. In 2015 poems by Steemers, translated into Portuguese by Carolina Marques, appeared in the Brazilian surrealist magazine A Phala. The Belgium artist Fred Michiels published a booklet with his long poem: Roadside Tourists (Bermtoeristen, 2016). Steemers is preparing a bundle of translations by several translators of his poem Natureingang in German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Korean, Quercha, Spanish, Wolof, etc. He is currently simultaneously working on his ‘novellette’ Roadside Tourist, as well on his Memorabilia Leida Torckis as a publisher-antiquarian, and on a translation of some French poems of Belle van Zuylen.

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