If it had not been for the EBSN, I would probably never have met René. At the 2017 EBSN conference in Paris I was asked to chair the presentation of a fellow Dutchman I had never heard of – René van der Voort. René introduced an interesting series of slides from the archive of the Dutch poet Harry Hoogstraten, who was close to a large number of Beat and Beat-related writers, including Gary Snyder and Richard Brautigan. After his presentation René and I ended up talking. He had already told me that he ran a record store in The Hague – Any Record, the name I had seen on the plastic bag in which he had brought his slides. Because he had to return to The Hague to look after the store, he could not stay until the end of the conference. But we liked each other and arranged to meet soon at René’s house in The Hague.
When a few weeks later I travelled to The Hague, René picked me up at the tram stop close to his house. I told him that I had enjoyed the ride on the tram, because it passed the neighbourhood where I had lived as a teenager. It turned out that René and I had grown up about a hundred metres from each other, but had never met. I told him that at the corner grocery close to both our homes my mother would sometimes meet the sister of one of Holland’s most famous comedians, Dorus. “That”, René laconically said, “was my mother”. The coincidence helped to create a bond between us which quickly became a friendship.
My visits to René would usually follow the same pattern. In the collective housing project where he and his partner Sylvia each had their own apartment, we would first spend some time at Sylvia’s place to share the recent developments in our lives. Next, in his own book-filled apartment, René would proudly show and give me the spoken word tape cassettes he had produced since my last visit. They would be discussed in detail, but we also talked about other things.
René turned out to have led a varied and at times adventurous life. He left home when he was only sixteen and travelled to Spain, where under the Franco regime long-haired teenagers were not exactly welcomed. When the authorities in Barcelona ordered him to cut off his hair, he moved on to Ibiza. There, and on its neighbour Formentera, he took quite a few chances by selling marijuana to the bohemians and hippies on both islands. Once back in The Hague he worked as a cook in a vegetarian restaurant and in 1984 opened Any Record, which until it closed in 2018 was the place to be for anyone looking for music that was not mainstream. René also sold books and, both in his store and elsewhere in The Hague, organized performances of experimental music, spoken word sessions and screenings of underground films.
In 1993 René was one of the inspirational figures behind Crossing Border, a festival in The Hague which quickly became an annual mainstay for alternative cultural events in The Netherlands. It featured readings by poets and writers from various countries, often with a strong contingent of Beat writers, mixed with musical and theatrical performances. As host to many of the visiting authors René got to know some of them more closely. Much to his regret Crossing Border gradually became more commercial and by 1997 he was no longer active in the festival.
It is no coincidence that around that time René set up Counter Culture Chronicles, a label which focussed on the counterculture and the avant-garde and which by 2025 had issued more than two hundred tape cassettes, chapbooks, folders and an occasional LP, in editions of 50-100 each that sold out almost immediately. Among the tapes that were of special Beat interest were recordings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso, but also of lesser knowns such as Piero Heliczer and Ira Cohen. René’s enthusiasm for the work of the latter two hints at one of his main interests, the work and the lives of the American expatriate writers in Europe; they were not only the subject of his presentation at the 2017 EBSN-conference, but a year later also of his talk at the 2018 conference in Vienna.
In recent years René’s health gradually failed him, but that did not stop him from devoting all his energy to what he loved doing most: sharing his love for certain writers, poets, musicians and other artists by bringing out material that so far had been overlooked or was collecting dust in the vaults – one of his series of tape cassettes was in fact titled “From the vaults”. Apart from these activities, he was a frequent visitor to the village of Ruigoord, the artist’s community in the vicinity of Amsterdam. There he co-organized poetry and music sessions in which, not surprisingly, the work of Beat-related writers, from Simon Vinkenoog to Ira Cohen, was often featured. He was also the driving force behind the organization of a Kerouac Centennial in Ruigoord in 2022 and the documentary film about the event, made by director Wouter Verhoeven. René also provided the voice-over in the film, with featured appearances by, among many others, Joyce Johnson and Ed Sanders. Fortunately, René was able to introduce the film himself at the 2025 EBSN-conference in Hildesheim.
Not long after, his health let him down completely. At the end of 2025 he was hospitalized for cancer; when his condition turned out to be inoperable, he was moved to a nursing home. There, even when he became bedridden, he continued to make plans and to receive friends. Of course he had many difficult moments, but in the company of like-minded visitors he would come alive and share his enthusiasm and knowledge as he was wont to do. He was also still able to give detailed instructions for the chapbook about the British artist and musician Mal Dean which René and I had been working on for some time and which will now be produced by René’s friend and co-publisher Erik Sluijter. On March 20 René was well enough to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday in the company of friends and his loved ones: Sylvia, her daughter Femke and Femke’s husband and children. René died two weeks later, on April 3, 2026.
On many occasions, including the EBSN-conferences in which he participated, René tended to keep a low profile. He himself did not draw attention to his writing. Apart from his contributions to a number of EBSN-conferences, he not only wrote an interesting text on Richard Brautigan’s visits to Amsterdam, but also one on Allen Ginsberg’s travels in India. A piece he wrote together with Mr. Pelham on Ginsberg’s association with punk rocker and writer Richard Hell will shortly appear in the Allen Ginsberg Centennial issue of Beatdom.
It is a fitting tribute to a generous and much-loved friend, a kind man who unobtrusively spread beauty and helped to make the world, mine and that of many others, much more interesting and exciting.
Jaap van der Bent,
Nijmegen, May 2026
(Published by Benjamin J. Heal, June 2026)