Occupied City, a famous poetry volume (Bezette Stad, 1921), by Antwerp avant-garde poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896-1928), offers the reader a subjective and highly partisan account of life in Antwerp on the eve of and during the Great War. It is traditionally considered to be one of the most prominent samples of avantgarde poetry in Dutch, Van Ostaijen ranks high in the canon of 20th-century Flemish-Dutch literature, and Occupied City is among the most extensively commented texts in modern Dutch poetry. One could therefore be inclined to think that revisiting it is unlikely to yield a wealth of new insights. This paper refutes this idea by making a case for analysing the text as a ‘dialogic’ response to its historical context, while taking into account recent insights that have advanced in various Fields of historical study. One of these fields is the history of entertainment.