Kip Zegers

The Poet of Schools Kip Zegers

Poetry. The vocation of teacher may never be more intimately, more delicately and gracefully made understood than in these poems that are not so much meditations on the vacant dawn classroom come alive with the wonder of an adolescent by lunch hour; neither are they vignettes, nor tableaux presenting the scenes of a life spent teaching-what can happen in the ephemeral moment when fledgling writers 'lightning bug emptiness.' The viscerally felt life-in days hard at it, in a teacher's daily recommitment not so much to students' learning the technique of writing but rather to their entering into the fullness of awareness and language, 'as if / the person they are becoming / has arrived, using words / they will own / if all goes well'--this is what this teacher and poet is after. The real instruction of the craft, for the one who is willing to be undone by the completely unexpected on any day, takes place when 'a girl's writing razors the skin / of her life, leaving white bone open. / She does not stitch it up.' It is not craft and it is not teaching, in Zegers' fine testaments, which grab you. His poems are the residue of moments when teacher and student have been transformed by their rendez-vous. Zegers' poems both inspire and haunt. Be prepared.--Burt Kimmelman