M. H. Benders

M. H. Benders is a Dutch poet who currently lives in Istanbul, Turkey. [http://www.martijnbenders.nl] M.H.Benders was one of the first Dutch poets that worked with multimedia on the internet on the now extinct domain kannibaal.nl. Some of these works are still online on his own site. He won the Meervaart Price for Literature in 1994 and the Dunya Price for Literature in 2003. However, instead of collecting these prices himself he sent Dikke Dennis to read poetry pretending to be M.H.Benders. On another occasion the Dutch composer [http://composers21.com/compdocs/vriezens.htm Samuel Vriezen] performed pretending to be Benders with a fake moustache.

Benders currently works on two different projects: The ' [http://risee.weblog.nl/risee/2006/11/berichten_van_h_1.html Op Vakantie met de Pauzeman'] project (On a vacation with Lunchman) together with Samuel Vriezen, which is a serial poem written over email with guest poets which promises to become the largest poem ever written in the history of literature, and the collected works of M.H.Benders, which also will be an unicum since Benders will be the first Dutch poet to publish his collected works while still alive without ever publishing any conventional books first. The literary magazine [http://www.wereldraadsel.nl Wereldraadsel] has nicknamed Benders the first Dutch Stuntpoet. However, his poetry is mostly a mix between absurdism and conceptualism and seems to have little to do with his public stunts that, some argue, are mainly there because of his contempt for the Dutch world of literature, a feature he shares with Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij