Annie Finch | September 2017

   
Carolyn Kizer & Annie Finch

NOTES

An early photo of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop gives a sense of the kind of creative writing world Carolyn Kizer, a twenty-nine-year-old divorced single mother of three children, was entering when she walked into Theodore Roethke’s poetry workshop in 1954. In the Iowa photo, taken five years later in 1959, two white men (Robert Frost and Paul Engle) address twenty-two white students—nineteen of them males.¹ Today when women enroll in creative writing programs in numbers proportionate to our percentage of the population, it may be hard to fathom a climate in which the entire category of “women’s poetry” was fair game for insults, stereotypes, and condescension from critics and poets including Roethke himself, who famously mocked women poets, as a group, for a multitude of sins including “hiding from the real agonies of the spirit,” “refusing to face up to what existence is,” and “stamping a tiny foot against God.”²

Kizer later described her experience to The Paris Review: “I had never taken myself seriously as a poet, and at that point the poetry didn’t deserve it. But then, most women poets of my generation didn’t dare take themselves seriously, because the men didn’t take us seriously—I was almost middle-aged before the idea penetrated. But Ted took poetry seriously, and taught me to do so eventually.”³

Eventually, Kizer would become a serious poet indeed—author of eight original, delightful, and influential books, the kind of poet who can leave lines and phrases echoing in the mind as tangibly and hauntingly as smells or colors. No wonder many were elated when her fifth book Yin, after being turned down by every major publisher, was taken up by the small press BOA Editions and won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 

Carolyn Kizer is also known for being a citizen of literature, one who took on major responsibilities to writers and readers and to shaping the future of creative writing in this country. At a time when many poets were unable or afraid to act on behalf of women, she converted her keen awareness of being part of a silenced and marginalized half of the population into thoughtful and courageous literary activism designed to raise awareness of the voices of women, people of color, and international writers in the United States; a review in The New York Times defined her as “a feminist practically before the term existed.”⁴ And all that work is still bearing fruit in today’s creative writing community. 

Kizer’s first public piece of literary service was to cofound Poetry Northwest in 1959. Part of that magazine’s long-lived success has been due to its liberatory commitment, in Kizer’s words, “to encourage the young and the inexperienced, the neglected mature, and the rough major talents and the fragile minor ones.”⁵ The magazine helped establish the careers of John Berryman, Maxine Kumin (Kizer was one of the first editors to publish her work), Csezlaw Milosz, Anne Sexton, and many others, while increasing awareness of the Northwest in the national literary conversation. In the mid 1960s, Kizer left the editorship of the magazine to work in Pakistan as a Specialist in Literature for the State Department, then returned to Washington, DC as part of the discussion about the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts. As Hayden Carruth points out, this “was the first federal venture into the arts since the controversial awarding of the Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress to Ezra Pound in 1948. Now that we are used to the presence of the NEA in Washington, it is easy to forget how vexed was the whole question of governmental participation in the arts at that time.”⁶

Carolyn served as the NEA’s first Director of Literary Programs, pioneering much that today we take for granted in the literary world. At that time these innovations were, as she put it in a 1967 interview, “unique things that are very much in the experimental stages that have never been attempted by any government so far as I know.”⁷ These pioneering programs included establishing the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines; developing Poets in the Schools programs, with particular emphasis on schools serving Hispanic and Native American children; organizing the first PEN conference on American soil which allowed Latin American writers, including Pablo Neruda, to enter the US for the first time; sending African American and white poets together on week-long residencies to colleges in the South that had never before had the ability to host visiting speakers; and supporting the Translation Projects of the Center for Inter-American Relations to translate Latin American literature into English. 

During the 1970s, Kizer began teaching creative writing—not a common path for women at the time, as is clear from Kathleen Spivack’s juicy recent memoir With Robert Lowell and His Circle. Spivack’s anecdotes include a description of a dinner party in the mid-1960s where four male university presidents bragged about the tricks they used to avoid hiring women faculty, such as sharing Helen Vendler between two universities so they could both claim affirmative action credit for the same woman. But even in that environment, Carolyn Kizer made a mark, teaching as a guest writer at universities including
Columbia, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton, San Jose State University, Stanford, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Though I knew Kizer over many years, I saw her in a classroom only once, when I was teaching at Miami University of Ohio and brought her—seventy-six years old, crotchety, frank, and loads of fun—in for a day as a guest poet. Carolyn led her workshop differently than any poet I’d ever seen. She would lift a student’s poem off the top of the stack at her elbow and comment as everyone looked at their own copy, pronouncing her concise prescriptions with airtight conviction: “not bad—it’s almost done”; “fix the diction—it’s embarrassing”; “hmmm… interesting boat image. Make that the center of the poem”; “the fourth stanza is the best part, you may not need the rest.” Then straight to the next poem. There was no inviting of student input at all—just the chance to watch a brilliant mind assessing poems. 

Sometime during that class it occurred to me, with a shiver of awe at time, history, and the legacies of a literary life, that Kizer was likely teaching as Roethke had done. Later it seemed my hunch was right when I read her foreword to the 1969 volume Theodore Roethke: On Poetry and Craft, which concludes, “I’m amazed that my teaching methods are such a duplicate of his. I haven’t really thought up anything much on my own. I’ve simply carried on as the master taught me.” Kizer’s magnificently written essay recounts Roethke’s useful belief that “every line of a poem should be a poem” and details many of his signature recommendations, including cutting a line out of each stanza if the poem seems flabby, recasting a whole form from scratch, or removing all the adjectives since “the verb is the center of the poem.”⁸ Perhaps Kizer’s biggest tribute to Roethke’s teaching is her claim that, unlike other poets of the time who wanted their students to write like themselves, he made great efforts to honor, protect, and encourage the unique strangeness of every poet’s voice. 

That day in Ohio, I experienced firsthand Carolyn’s carrying on of this last principle as we sat in her hotel room and she asked to see the manuscript of my collection of poems Calendars. When I mentioned that I had put a group of chant-like poems in the back because I wasn’t sure if they even belonged in the book, she leafed through the typescript and pronounced that they were the best part and should be foregrounded. Of course, she was right. It didn’t take long for the realization to dawn that the reason I hadn’t figured it out for myself was my fear of being strange and different—and at that instant, the fear vanished like a clammy mist in the light of her belief in me. Isn’t this kind of permission-granting to the core voice the most valuable service one poet can perform for another? That hour with Carolyn changed not only my third book, but the path of my poetic voice and of my life.

I have written elsewhere about how great a gift Carolyn Kizer bestowed on the poetry world through her mentoring of younger women poets.⁹ It’s hard to explain today now how unusual such generosity was for a woman poet of Carolyn’s generation. She stood out, whether through donating belly dance costumes obtained on her travels for an auction to benefit Poetry Flash, sending out witty Christmas cards with feminist subtexts (“major poets don’t send Christmas cards!”), inviting women poets to her home for a “Lady Poets’ lunch,” or fostering the kind of networking that male poets take for granted, for example, urging me to introduce myself to Marie Ponsot on a trip to New York with the phrase, “go with your book tucked under your arm.”¹⁰

It was, I believe, the same sense of female solidarity that led to one of Kizer’s most prominent acts of courage on behalf of the poetry world as we know it today: her public resignation, along with Maxine Kumin, from a Chancellorship of the Academy of American Poets in 1998. Kizer and Kumin decided to resign after nominating Lucille Clifton for a Chancellorship for a second time, only to have a white man selected, for a second time, instead. Since there only four women among the twelve chancellors, the resignation of two of them, followed by Kizer’s call to The New York Times explaining that they were resigning to protest the Chancellors’ elitism and lack of gender and racial diversity, had a significant impact on the structure of the Academy.

Another lasting gift of Kizer’s attention to women poets is her brilliantly edited, eclectic little anthology 100 Great Poems by Women. Focusing on “gender-neutral” topics, she writes in her forward, “this anthology is bent on showing what women can write about besides romance and domesticity.” A public poet herself, Kizer includes Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” and Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” along with satire, political and protest poetry, anonymous or pseudonymous gems, and poems that, like some of her own finest, celebrate friendships between women. I recall the shocked gratitude I felt as a young poet reading through this luminescent anthology, an act of unabashed poetic celebration that made me feel in my bones the truth of women’s gloriously distinctive poetic voices and traditions. 

Carolyn’s own poetry reflects her political commitments and, in her writing about Japanese and Chinese literature and translations from Chinese, French African, Macedonian, Urdu, and Yiddish poetry, her international perspective. Her feminism shows up on many levels in her work. There is the outspoken anger of poems like “Bitch,” triumphant with a take-no-prisoners snark that those who knew her in person will recognize and will likely never be able to shake fully from our ears. There is her dedication to women-affirming subject matter, whether in poems such as “Semele Recycled” that bring to life ancient goddesses, poems on historical women such as R.L. Stevenson’s wife Fanny, or poems evoking women poets, from the 12^th-century Chinese poet who inspired her poem “In the First Stanza” to Muriel Rukeyser. 

Two of Kizer’s greatest poems center on the theme of women poets. “A Muse of Water,” the poem she chose to conclude her volume Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women, was inspired by her fury at a sexist comment made during a dinner party by Robert Lowell (right after he had made a pass at her, she later told The Paris Review) to the effect that women should not try to be artists but stay in the kitchen.¹¹ It is a manifesto, a defense of the woman poet whose brimming creativities have been drained by centuries of service to men as muse, not to mention mother. In an ironic nod to the traditions of self-deprecating female apologia such as Anne Bradstreet’s “Prologue,” “A Muse of Water” concludes with a humbly chilling taunt:

Here the warm shallows lave your feet
Like tawny hair of magdalens.
Here, if you care, and lie full-length,
Is water deep enough to drown.

Such irony turns full-fledged satire in Kizer’s most ambitious feminist literary manifesto, the Juvenal-inspired long poem Pro Femina, which begins with memorable bitterness: 

I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket.
Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman.
And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters
On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers.
Think of that crew of self-pitiers…

No self-pitier herself, Carolyn Kizer spent decades putting her considerable advantages and skills—not only literary talent but also courage, love of justice, intelligence, charisma, persistence, force of will, charm, education, social ease, glamour, common sense, and wit, among others—to work improving and transforming the literary culture she loved. No wonder The San Francisco Chronicle once claimed that “Carolyn Kizer is a kind of institution.”¹² And it is thanks to her that many of the official and unofficial institutions of creative writing in the contemporary USA are both vibrant and liberatory today.

Annie Finch’s eighteen books of poetry and poetics include the poetry volumes Eve, Calendars, Among the Goddesses, and Spells: New and Selected Poems and the poetry textbook A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry. She directed the Stonecoast MFA Program for nine years and now teaches on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

Notes

1. Photo on Iowa Writers’ Workshop website, https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/about/about-workshop/history
2. Theodore Roethke, “The Poetry of Louise Bogan,” Michigan Quarterly Review LXVII: 10 (December 1960), p. 13
3. Carolyn Kizer, “Theodore Roethke as Teacher,” Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose, Eastern Washington University Press, 1995, pp. 157
4. Melanie Rehak, “Freedom and Poetry,” review of Cool, Calm, and Collected by Carolyn Kizer, New York Times, Dec. 17, 2000
5. Poetry Northwest website, http://www.poetrynw.org/about/
6. Hayden Carruth, “Afterword,” Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work, Ed. Finch, Keller, and McClelland, Cavankerry Press, 2001. p. 143.
7. William Holland, “Interview with Carolyn Kizer” (1967), Reprinted in Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work, Ed. Finch, Keller, and McClelland, Cavankerry Press, 2001. pp. 183–87.
8. Carolyn Kizer, “Theodore Roethke as Teacher,” Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose, Eastern Washington University Press, 1995, pp. 157–168 passim
9. Annie Finch, “Visiting Carolyn Kizer,” Poetry Foundation Website, March 11, 2014. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/70106
10. “Belly dance costumes”: as told to A.F. by Joyce Jenkins, October 2012. “Lady Poets’ lunch”: Terry Ehret, “Semele Recycled: A Sacred Tale of Regeration” in Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work, Ed. Finch, Keller, and McClelland, Cavankerry Press, 2001. p. 42.
11. Barbara Thompson, “Carolyn Kizer: The Art of Poetry,” The Paris Review (Spring 2000), Reprinted in Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work, Ed. Finch, Keller, and McClelland, Cavankerry Press, 2001. p. 209
12. Allan Jalon, “Cool, Calm, and Collected,” SFGate, January 7, 2001.