When New Jersey native Garret Keizer moved to the Northeast Kingdom 40 years ago, locals knew him as a high school English teacher. Then he became an Episcopal clergyman and a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine.
Keizer’s now set to present the “headlining reading” Friday at the Burlington Book Festival. The 66-year-old Sutton husband and father will do so in yet another capacity: Newly published poet.
“Some people seem surprised,” says the man whose debut collection “The World Pushes Back” has won the annual X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize as the same time his nonfiction work led to his induction over the weekend into the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences.
But Keizer says it’s a long time coming. Born in the same hometown as the late acclaimed Beat Generation writer Allen Ginsberg, he first read poetry as a high schooler a half-century ago.
“That made me want to try it myself,” he recalls. “I saw an easy leap between the rock and roll music I was listening to. There was a sense of something stirring inside that needed to be put down and a joyfulness in writing that stayed with me.”
Keizer went on to study English at Montclair State University.
“One strong driver of my writing is my love of reading,” he says. “I think it’s only human to want to do the things you like seeing done. You watch baseball and you want to play. You hear a rock concert and you want to start your own band.”
In contrast, Keizer’s 1979 move to the Northeast Kingdom came simply because the new teacher and his speech-pathologist wife found jobs there. One of his first friends was the now late Orleans poet and Robert Frost protégé James Hayford.
“At craft shows held in northeastern Vermont throughout the year, one proud and not-so-embarrassed craftsman is a septuagenarian poet handing out free samples of his work,” Keizer wrote of Hayford in a 1989 Vermont Life profile. “Those acquainted with Hayford or with odd bits of literary history know him as the one who received ‘the laying on of hands’ from Robert Frost, the one whom contemporary poet X.J. Kennedy has called the ‘unofficial New England poet laureate.’ To close friends, he is even more.”
Hayford would read Keizer’s poems and introduce him to Kennedy. But Keizer turned to nonfiction after his unsuccessful nomination as Vermont Teacher of the Year.
“I had to write a short essay,” he remembers.
The late, legendary Northeast Kingdom novelist Howard Frank Mosher, then a fellow teacher, suggested it was the seed of a book. The New York publishing house Viking, which had rejected Keizer’s early poetry, went on to release his memoir “No Place But Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community” in 1988.
“I used to tell students, ‘Which would I rather have, Vermont Teacher of the Year or a book contract?’” he says. “You lose one thing today, maybe it turns into a win tomorrow.”
Keizer wrote about his subsequent career exploration as a clergyman in the 1991 book “A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry” before moving on to more earthbound questions upon affiliating with Harper’s Magazine in 2001.
In his 2004 book, “Help: The Original Human Dilemma,” he explores whether religion actually hinders.
“Our children wander off into the woods because we are so absorbed in providing free therapy to a pesky neighbor that we never see them go,” he writes in it. “We park our mother on a blind curve in order to help a stranger change a flat tire. Or we leave our family parked at home while we go off to listen to a friend or a client complain how drinking has kept him from being a good father, only to return, hours after our kids are in bed, drunk and stinking from the wine of our own benevolence.”
“The essential humanitarian question is not how we defeat hunger or cure disease or curb the tide of genocidal nationalism,” he continues. “Rather, it is how we wrestle with our sense of futility in the face of those disasters.
Keizer’s most recent book, 2014’s “Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher,” came after his family lost health insurance before the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. He filled in as an English teacher at the local high school to regain coverage.
“I’ve had virtually no career ladder but loads of rungs,” he says. “I’m very thankful for all for providing material for my writing. If I want to eat, I can write a prose piece.”
Poetry is different.
“I’ve never tried to force a poem,” he says. “It comes when it comes.”
A year ago, Keizer had written enough to submit a collection to the jury of the annual X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, which awarded him a publishing contract with the Texas Review Press.
“In the beginning I was writing almost exclusively free verse, then traditional sonnets, and now I’m as likely to do one as the other,” he says. “My poetry is lyrically personal, so it’s going to reflect by biography.”
Keizer, who the New York Times has called “an irascible idealist,” demonstrates in his poem titled “The Neighbors.”
When a man and woman built their house
on the hill behind mine, thus ruining
forever the satisfaction I took
in seeing no house but mine
in any direction,
I felt cheated and bitter.
But as his poem continues, Keizer’s view changes again.
The woman gave birth to a son,
who calls my name cycling down the road
as though I were his long-lost friend.
So I live at the foot of the hill,
and any bitter man who would climb it,
meaning my neighbors harm,
must first get past me.
“I’m more likely to save poetry,” he says, “for what I can’t say in prose.”
Even if Keizer isn’t paid for it. When he won the poetry prize last year, it came with no financial reward. Since then, presenters have decided to give future awardees $10,000.
“There was a slight ache when that was announced,” he says. “But it’s good for me because some people will think I’m the guy who won $10,000, although my accountant will tell you I didn’t.”
Instead, Keizer says he reaped another lose-today, win-tomorrow payoff: “It makes a good story.”
