Carolyn Kizer
Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born in 1925 in Spokane, Washington. Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizer’s childhood was suffused with poetry. Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of [John] Keats; mother went for [Walt] Whitman. No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to. But I think my choices of [Gertrude] Stein and [George Bernard] Shaw show that my tastes were different. I remember that when I was eleven or twelve I came storming home from school demanding, ‘Why didn't you ever tell me about [Alexander] Pope and [John] Dryden?’ They were stunned. Our library, copious as it was, didn't contain the works of either. These were lasting influences. I have continued to prefer, and write, poems that have what you might call ‘a sting in the tail.’ Add Catullus and Juvenal. I adored wit, irony, and intellectual precision.” Kizer’s work is known for just those traits. From her early poems in The Ungrateful Garden (1961) to the Pulitzer-prize winning Yin: New Poems (1984) to such later works as Pro Femina (2000), which satirizes liberated women writers by mimicking the hexameter used by the ancient misogynist poet Juvenal, and her retrospective Calm, Cool, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001), Kizer’s work has received acclaim for its intellectual rigor, formal mastery, and willingness to engage with political realities. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Carolyn Kizer is a kind of institution... For over 40 years, she's made poems with a stern work ethic of literary thought and linguistic scrupulousness.” In an interview with Allan Jalon for the Los Angeles Times, Kizer described her own style: “I’m not a formalist, not a confessional poet, not strictly a free-verse poet.” Jalon described Kizer as, “Tough without being cold, sometimes satirical (she’s a great admirer of Alexander Pope),” and noted that “her work expresses a worldly largeness that repeatedly focuses on the points at which lives meet. ‘That’s my subject,’” concluded Kizer. “No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.”
“Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!”
“Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.[...]So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?”
“You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.”
“Food of LoveEating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler III'm going to murder you with love;I'm going to suffocate you with embraces;I'm going to hug you, bone by bone,Till you're dead all over.Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.You will become my personal Sahara;I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallowDrain you remaining brackish well.With my female blade I'll carve my nameIn your most aspiring palmBefore I chop it down.Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole.But in the total desert you becomeYou'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,Opulent mirage!Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen.Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.So you will summon each dry grain of sandAnd move towards me in undulating dunesTill you arrive at sudden ultramarine:A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudesYour barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,Surprising life! And I will be that green.When you are fed and watered, flourishingWith shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire,Till you are resurrected field in bloom,I will devour you, my natural food,My host, my final supper on the earth,And you'll begin to die again. ”
“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. ”
“from "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name!-- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best.And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once,while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business.And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more.We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers.But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,and passion, its bloody labor,its birth and rebirth and decay.”