Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life & Work

Book of the Year, Bronze Award, 2004
Independent Publisher Book Awards, Finalist—Anthology, 2005

Critical essays about the poet and her work, interviews with Kizer, and poems written in her honor. Kizer’s gifts are acknowledged in this book: her humor, her mythological scope, political awareness, satirical wit, feminism, craft, lyricism, her role in shaping literary institutions and her charisma. Carolyn Kizer is a celebration of the poetry itself, of the enduring work that places Kizer in the pantheon of living American poets.

Contributors include Agha Shahid Ali, Michelle Boisseau, Hayden Carruth, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Dominic Cheung, Lucille Clifton, Alfred Corn, Robert Creeley, Terry Ehret, Annie Finch, Jack Foley, William Holland, Judith Johnson, Maxine Kumin, Carol Muske, Robert Phillips, Marie Ponsot, Margaret Rabb, C. L. Rawlins, Ruth Salvaggio, Terry Stokes, Henry Taylor, Barbara Thompson, Kim Vaeth, Jackson Wheeler.

Robert Creeley
Bub and Sis

For Carolyn Kizer

Let the dog lie down with the dog,
people with people.
It makes a difference where you fit
and how you feel.

When young, I was everybody’s human,
a usual freaked person,
looking for love in the dark,
being afraid to turn the lights on.

It makes a great difference
to have a friend
who’s a woman,
when you’re a so-called man,

who can talk to you
across the great divide
of mixed signals
and wound pride.

Small thanks in the end
for that maintaining sister,
but what she says
is what you remember.

Carolyn Kizer was a feminist before the word came into vogue. Her famous poem “Pro Femina” legitimized a new generation of women writers’ attention to the undisclosed fact of their lives . . . The work of the last fifteen years has grown more political, more worldly, while at the same time preserving the candor and tenderness that illuminate such poems as “Gerda” and Pearl,” in which she writes from the point of view of the child she was . . . Carolyn’s mind has the broad range of a predator, the vocabulary of a lexicographer, and the rich lyricism of those song writers of the forties whom we both adore.
— Maxine Kumin

April 2001
232 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 8.5
$27
978-0-9678856-5-0