As a poet, essayist and prose writer, Tonnus Oosterhoff was born in 1953. He studied Dutch literature and linguistics at the University of Groningen. Before publishing literary work, he wrote several anonymous stories for the magazine Mijn Geheim.

In the field of ‘poems in motion’, he is considered a pioneer, not only at home but around the world. In 2005 he was a guest writer at his old university in Groningen. Since his de- but poetry collection, Boerentijger (‘Farm Tiger’, C. Buddingh’ prize 1990), his work has been awarded countless prizes in the Netherlands, with the current highlight being the P.C. Hooft-prize, which he received 2012 for his entire poetic oeuvre.

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Then they said, those brains of mine:
this particular article we don’t understand.
Is it in a language we don’t know?
No, it isn’t in a language we don’t know.
Is it on a subject we know nothing about?
No, we know a lot about the subject and find it interesting. Why is it then as if the hutches of words
are empty?

In ditches and holes the connections wait
until the magazine closes itself. Put on my glasses, to be on the safe side startles the pigeons. Because the intelligible sentence doesn’t move, rather, the unintelligible sentence moves.

We took you to heaven, now go figure it out for yourself.