K. Schippers

Gerard Stigter (6 November 1936 – 12 August 2021), known by the pseudonym K. Schippers, was a Dutch poet, prose writer and art critic. Credited with having introduced the readymade as a poetic form, the whole of his work is dedicated to looking at everyday objects and events in a new way.

Career

Schippers was born in Amsterdam. Together with J. Bernlef and other friends, he founded the Neo-Dadaist magazine ''Barbarber'' (1958–71). In the years that followed the launch he co-operated with Bernlef in editing selections from the magazine and, in ''Een cheque voor de tandarts'' (A cheque for the dentist, 1967), in commenting on the ancestry of its literary stance. Another binding link with Bernlef is the fact that in 1960 they married twin sisters, the daughters of the Dutch poet Ed. Hoornik (1910–70).

As an art critic, Schippers also authored studies of the history of Dada in the Netherlands (''Holland Dada'', 1974) and of the bride theme in the work of Marcel Duchamp (''De bruid van Marcel Duchamp'', 2010), as well as writing his own text inspired by the work of Man Ray (''Het formaat van Man Ray'', 1979) and editing the experimental poems of Theo van Doesburg (''Nieuwe woordbeeldingen. Verzamelde gedichten van I.K. Bonset'', 1975).

Among the literary awards Schippers garnered was the 1966 Amsterdam Municipal poetry prize for his second collection of poetry, ''Een klok en profil''; the 1983 Multatuli Prize for his third novel ''Beweegredenen''; the 1995 and 1999 Silver Griffin for his plays for children; and the 1996 P.C. Hooft Award for his work as a whole. After his selected poems of 1980, he published no new collections until 2011. In 2014 his collection ''Buiten Beeld'' was chosen as the gift volume to accompany other poetry purchases during National Poetry Week in the Netherlands and Flanders.

Crossing boundaries

When Schippers helped launch ''Barbarber'', it was called a ‘magazine for texts’ (''tijdschrift voor teksten'') and was distrustful of the work of the preceding 1950s generation of experimental poets on the grounds that their concern had been more with aesthetics than with the nature of reality, which ought to be the real focus of poetry. The anti-poetic gestures appearing there were inspired by Dada and eventually introduced ‘literary ready-mades’ in order to call into question the boundary between art and reality. One item provided by Schippers was a newspaper item about a lost tortoise. The same iconoclastic attitudes continued into his later work. In ''Buiten Beeld'' (Beyond the frame, 2014), for example, bare dots on the two-dimensional page are titled “The position of moles in the sky”, drawing a parallel between a conventional star map and molehills in the earth merely by the suggestiveness of the title alone.

Though much of his later poetic work has an apparent form, it very seldom rhymes or makes use of metaphor and its main purpose is to draw attention to the ordinary and everyday. In “White” Schippers affirms that “white is noticed/ because it’s not alone/ on the paper”. This same approach is confirmed too in ''Buiten Beeld'' in the poem “Black”, with its final appeal to a child's vision: ‘Look at etters like a five-year-old/ who has never/ read a word’. Such a fresh way of looking at ordinary things from unfamiliar angles was suggested by Marcel Duchamp’s saying that ‘when a clock is seen from the side it no longer tells the time’, from which Schippers took the title of his second poetry collection, ''Een klok en profil'' (A clock in profile, 1965).

Eventually he also extended this vision into his novels. ''Eerste Indrukken'' (First impressions, 1979) is subtitled ‘the memoirs of a three-year-old’, where nothing unusual happens to the youngster, but it is related from an unusual, fresh perspective. Some poems were recycled into these novels. The sentence “Take a good look around you and you see everything is coloured” in his novel ''Bewijsmateriaal'' (Material Evidence, 1978) first appeared as a 4-line poem in his collection ''Een vis zwemt uit zijn taalgebied'' (A fish swims out of its meaning area, 1976). The four sentences of ''De la grammaire anglaise et hollandaise avec un coup de théâtre triste'', which are the same in English as in Dutch, are repeated in ''Zilah'' (2002). In general, the fantastic situations in these novels flow from a single initial supposition or macguffin. In ''Zilah'' (2002) it is the consequences that follow when the heroine buys the rights to the Dutch language as a trademark name; in ''Waar was je nou'' (Where were you, 2005), it is the ability to enter a photograph and relive one's own past.

In the case of the poem repeated in ''Bewijsmateriaal'', there was another form of recycling when it was put to use by the artist Klaas Gubbels

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