K. Schippers

Gerard Stigter (6 November 1936 – 12 August 2021[1]), known by the pseudonym K. Schippers, was a Dutch poet, prose writer and art critic.

[3] 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 in the magazine were inspired by Dada and eventually introduced ‘literary ready-mades’ in order to call into question the boundary between art and reality.

[5] 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.

[6] This same approach is confirmed too in Buiten Beeld in the poem “Black”, with its final appeal to a child's vision: ‘Look at [letters]/ like a five-year-old/ who has never/ read a word’.

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).

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.