her early poems garnered Kizer many awards, I prefer her later work, This book is an anthology of selections from earlier books that went out of print, I'm impressed more by her style than her content in this collection, Surf sounds reminding us that good decay surrounds us: fourth which pounds on flesh or stone, the slow assassination of the years,
He will read for years without looking up until your childhood is over,
I am amazed continually, by her unapologetic creative, lucid mind, Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born inin Spokane, Washington, Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizers 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 didnt you ever tell me about Alexander Pope and John Dryden They were stunned.
Our library, copious as it was, didnt Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born inin Spokane, Washington, Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizers 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, ” Kizers work is known for just those traits, From her early poems in The Ungrateful Gardento the Pulitzer prize winning Yin: New Poemsto such later works as Pro Femina, which satirizes liberated women writers by mimicking the hexameter used by the ancient misogynist poet Juvenal, and her retrospective Calm, Cool, and Collected: Poems, Kizers 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 overyears, 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: “Im not a formalist, not a confessional poet, not strictly a free verse poet.
” Jalon described Kizer as, “Tough without being cold, sometimes satirical shes 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.
Thats my subject,” concluded Kizer, “No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change, ” sitelink.