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Number
287
April/May 2001
Carolyn Kizer
& The Chain of
Women
ANNIE
FINCH
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
This essay will appear in Carolyn Kizer:
Perspectives on Her Life & Work, edited by
Annie Finch, Johanna Keller, and Candace
McClelland, to be published by CarvanKerry Press in
June 2001. This important new collection explores
and appreciates the contributions of one of our
most influential poets in her seventy-fifth year.
Carolyn Kizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Yin
in 1985. Her books include her recently reissued
debut The Ungrateful Garden, Midnight Was My
Cry, Mermaids in the Basement, and Harping
On: Poems 1985---1995. Her translations are
collected in Carrying Over; two essays
collections appeared in the nineties, Proses,
On Poems and Poets, and Picking and
Choosing, Essays on Prose. As an editor, she's
published The Essential John Clare and the
instant classic 100 Great Poems by Women.
She began her career, with fellow student James
Wright, studying with Theodore Roethke at
University of Washington. (Pulitzer Prize poets
all, and Carolyn Kizer was awarded the Theodore
Roethke Prize in 1988.) She has spoken out with
intellectural rigor and passion on many topics
during her career. She founded Poetry
Northwest in 1959, and served at the first
Literature Program Director at the National
Endowment for the Arts. She has traveled the world
for poetry: in the sixties she was Specialtist in
Literature for the U.S. State Department in
Paskistan, in the seventies and eigthties she held
apppoitments as distingusihed poet/lecturer at
major universitites across the nations, influencing
countless young poets. She is important to an
entire generation of poets and teachers. A
contribuitor to the volume, Carol Muske once wrote,
"It's true. Carolyn Kizer hung the
moon.…"Included in Carolyn Kizer:
Perspectives on Her Life and Work are essays
about her feminist politics, the influence of
Chinese poetry in her work, and her teaching
philosophy and methods, as well as poems dedicated
to and inspired by her, and interviews that range
over thirty years. Contributors include Hayden
Carruth, Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, Judith
Johnson, Jack Foley, Alfred Corn, Kim Vaeth, Maxine
Kumin, Carol Muske Dukes, Marie Ponsot, Agha Shahid
Ali, and many others. Cool, Calm &
Collected, Poems 1960--2000, by Carolyn Kizer,
has just been published by Copper Canyon. And a
Tribute to this wonderful woman, this poet of
boundless energy, of wit and fire, will be held at
the Associated Writing Programs annual meeting in
Palm Springs, California, April 2001.
It is the mark of a certain point in a young
writer's development---arguably the onset of true
literary maturity---when she looks up from the
eclectic, sprawling collection of classic and
contemporary influences she has been ostensibly
pulling together for herself for many years, takes
a long breath, and is struck by the depth of her
indebtedness to a much smaller group of writers.
Such a revelation happened to me recently regarding
Carolyn Kizer. Since Kizer is approaching her
seventy-fifth birthday and ready for some
long-deserved appreciation, this essay pays tribute
to her unique role in American women's poetry.
After all, where would I, as a woman poet who feels
a close connection to her foremothers in the art,
be---and where would so many of us be---without the
passionate figure of Carolyn Kizer to link us with
our past as women poets?
Kizer might not place herself among the writers
she so unforgettably dubbed, in "Pro Femina," "the
toasts-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen." But she
has earned a unique place in my personal canon just
because of her sometimes ambivalent but always
powerful relationship with such writers. Her poems
meet me in the twenty-first century while
simultaneously linking me back through a long
tradition of emotionally astute, poetically
exacting, passionate women poets that includes
Phillis Wheatley, Frances Osgood, Emily Dickinson,
Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sara Teasdale, Edna St.
Vincent Millay, Anna Hampstead Branch, Louise
Bogan, and Leonie Adams. Though the exquisitely
crafted and classically controlled work of such
poets is now beginning to earn a well-deserved
reconsideration, it is still a legacy fraught with
ambivalence for Kizer, as for most women poets.
Responsibility to these poets' concerns has
remained a crucial element of Kizer's aesthetic at
the same time that awareness of their limitations
has spurred her to refute and surpass them.
This powerful tradition of women poets built
successful careers writing formal, accessible poems
about spiritual and political as well as domestic
and emotional themes. I call their techniques
'sentimentist' to distinguish them from the more
familiar, very different techniques of the romantic
poets. Independently of romanticism and modernism,
the sentimentists developed and explored their own
poetic traditions and techniques: they wrote of a
shared, accessible world from an often diffused,
uncentered point of view, and they tended to
metaphorize the self, instead of nature or a loved
one, in their lyrics. As the decades went on and
women's positions improved, early twentieth-century
sentimentists adapted many of their precedessors'
techniques to more powerful and independent
attitudes and themes.
But at mid-century the chain broke. The poems of
Bishop and Moore preserved some aspects of the
sentimentist tradition into the seventies, in a
form so altered by the complex ironic stances of
modernism that in their hands the tradition lost
much of its original character. Plath and Sexton,
both of whom guiltily admired the sentimentist
women poets in their youth, died too young ever to
admit it. Feminist poets who came of age in the
sixties and seventies distanced themselves from the
sentimentists because of their subject matter, not
to mention their form. Finally, in the postmodern
climate of the eighties and nineties, the hermetic
tradition of Stein and H.D. pushed the
sentimentists even further distant on the basis of
their accessibility, while the intimate connections
between Dickinson and the central thread of women's
poetry continued to be ignored.
In the five decades following New Criticism the
classic tradition of women's poetry had been torn
apart. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain
in their essay "Forward Into the Past," the price
of poetic success for any woman after mid-centry
has been to despise virtually all pre-twentieth
century poetry by women, ignoring the intriguing
affinities between Dickinson, not to mention H.D.
and Stein, and the sentimentists. Yet, in such a
climate of uncompromising obliviousness to the
serious accomplishments of the vast bulk of women
poets, Carolyn Kizer has consistently acknowledged
and drawn on the legacy of the women poets who came
before her. Kizer's allusions to her foremothers
evoke, as often as not, anger, embarrassment, and
pain. Nonetheless, she has kept this irreplaceable
inheritance alive, and when the full story of
women's poetry has been reclaimed, Kizer's
importance as a poet should begin to be even more
widely understood.
The complexity of Kizer's relationship to the
sentimentists often forces her to play two
different roles in some of her poems, as in her
description of the "toasts-and-teasdales" in "Pro
Femina":
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,
not-very-distant,
Who carried the torch for themselves and got
first-degree burns.
Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved
at thirteen;
Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile
anthologists
Through lust-of-the-mind; barbituate-drenched
Camilles
With continuous periods, murmuring softly on
sofas
When poetry wasn't a craft but a sickly
effluvium,
The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional
blackmail.
Kizer's description here leads to an attack on
sentimentists like Teasdale and Millay, both
childless, married to older businessman husbands,
and eventually suicidal. Yet the number of lines
that Kizer devotes to these "conspicuous failures"
shows how impossible it is for her to ignore them
completely, and her tirade incorporates a note of
compassion for the sentimentists who, in attempting
to combine heterosexual love with artistic
creativity, succeeded only in earning our
contempt:
Impugning our sex to stay in good with the
men,
Commencing their insecure bluster. How they must
have swaggered
When women themselves endorsed their own
inferiority!
Vestals, vassals, and vessels, rolled into
several,
They took notes in rolling syllabics, in careful
journals,
Aiming to please a posterity that despises
them.
Section Three of "Pro Femina" ends with a
forthright assertion of Kizer's distance from the
sentimentists:
But we're emerging from all that, more or
less,
Except for some ladylike laggards and Quarterly
priestesses
Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim
competition.
Now, if we struggle abnormally, we may almost seem
normal;
If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined
industry;
If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep
with editors;
If we regard ourselves formally, respecting our
true limitations
Without making an unseemly show of trying to
unfreeze our assets;
Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining
unmarried;
And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we
stack up the dishes
And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers,
believe in the luck of
our children,
Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not
devour,
And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep
free women.
This conclusion, with its ironic last line,
shows Kizer taking up an almost entirely new
position from where the sentimentists left off. But
it ignores the issue of how such overwhelming
change happened in the culture at large---as well
as the even more germane issue of how such
necessary change can happen and will continue to
happen in poetry.
How can a poet like Kizer manage to reclaim the
tradition of her circumscribed, neglected literary
foremothers without compromising her own strength?
The poems themselves can best answer these
questions. In "Bitch," for instance, the speaker
takes the image of a bitch literally during a scene
where she encounters an ex-lover. This inner
"bitch," whom the speaker takes very firmly in hand
but cannot ignore, might share some characteristics
with the stereotypical lovelorn poetess:
At a kind word from him, a look like the old
days,
The bitch changes her tone: she begins to
whimper.
She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe.
Down, girl! Keep your distance
Or I'll give you a taste of the choke-chain.
The bitch, who is "too demonstrative, too
clumsy, / Not like the well-groomed pets of his new
friends," "gag[s]" at her mistress's polite
hypocrisy while being dragged "off by the scruff,"
and the poem ends on a note of grudging respect for
her.
Another poem, "Dream of a Large Lady," deals
with another sentimentist feminine shadow-figure, a
large lady who receives a note from another lady
remarking, in poetess-y diction, "I am an admirer
of your poesy." In response, the large lady resigns
herself to poetess-like behavior:
"Do come to my house near the bay,…
"We will sit here quietly, in twilight,
and drink a cup of carefully brewed tea."
But nonetheless she cannot forget the fact that
her original mission was to destroy a large mounted
gun; though she was only able to "decorate / but
not destroy" it, "clear in her eye she holds a
vision: / the thin, ceremonious shell" of the egg
she left on the gun emplacement. The poesy-loving
lady and the poet who has left the egg, a potent
symbol of literal and symbolic female fertility,
are closer than it appears, since the poet's choice
of the egg as subversive weapon draws directly on
the sentimentists' explicit female identification.
The symbolism of "Dream of a Large Lady" offers a
clue as to how Kizer has reconciled herself with
the sentimentist tradition by acknowledging its
power, thus strengthening her own ability to
develop beyond it.
On the deepest level of archetypal themes, then,
Kizer is interested in reconnecting with the basic
female powers---and the sentimentist tradition
offers a direct, if compromised, connection with
those powers. Sentimentists like Helen Hunt Jackson
or Lydia Sigourney explored themes of feminized
nature and a Native American spirituality, and
Kizer draws strength from the close connection of
these traditions with nature. Natural power in
Kizer's poetry is often exaggerated, as in the
fecund gardens in the "Fanny" section of "Pro
Femina" or the maimed goddesses of "Semele
Recycled" and "Hera, Hung From the Sky." Even the
title of Kizer's first volume, The Ungrateful
Garden, suggests on one level an uneasy
relation with the view of nature she had inherited
from the sentimentists. But Kizer's stories of
grief and defeat, outspoken as they are, descend
from the sentimentists' depressed laments. Like
their predecessor poems from Christina Rossetti's
"Song" to Louise Bogan's "Medusa," they are elegies
for the loss of female power. The depressed and
victimized voices that Kizer mocks in "Pro Femina"
were self-directed distortions of anger. Kizer's
martyred Hera and dismembered but ultimately
triumphant Semele make the sentimentists' historic
anger and oppression more conscious and
outer-directed, building on and transforming
tradition.
Kizer's ambivalent relation to the most
traditional, domestic themes of the sentimentists
leads to some of her most amusing and ironic work,
and a number of her more serious poems treat
relationships between female friends and between
mothers and daughters, traditional subjects of the
sentimentists. She offers cutting, delicious satire
of domestic themes in poems such as "Children"
("The orange crayon that didn't dare write, 'I hate
you.'") or "Mud Soup" ("Chop the onions, chop the
carrots, / Chop the tender index finger."). Even
Kizer's grouping of poems during the eighties into
two collections aimed at women and men (The
Nearness of You: Poems for Men and Mermaids
in the Basement: Poems for Women) evokes the
way poems by many sentimentists, Dickinson
included, arose out of and for a community of
actual people and their emotional
relationships.
Not only Kizer's themes, but her poetic
strategies themselves are influenced by the
sentimentists and throw their tradition into
clearer relief. The distinctive voice of "Bitch"and
"Threatening Letter," for instance, owes much to
the bitter archness of Millay. The persona poem
"Afterthoughts of Donna Elvira" uses the form and
tone of the sentimentist tradition to arrive at a
philosophy characteristic of many early
twentieth-century sentimentists: "Whenever we love,
we win, / Or else we have never been born." More
surprisingly, the remarkable poem "In the First
Stanza," based on a twelfth century Chinese women's
poem, transforms the poet's self into a natural
landscape in the exact manner of a sentimentist
such as Sara Teasdale, who in turn was building on
the self-transforming technique of earlier
sentimentists such as Lydia Sigourney:
first, I tell you who I am:
shadowed, reflective, small
pool in an unknown glade.
---Kizer
I am the pool of blue
That worships the vivid sky…
---Teasdale
You know me as turbulent ocean
clouded with thunder and drama.
---Kizer
I am a wave that cannot reach the shore,
---Teasdale
In the third stanza, I die.
…
I beg you to travel my body
till you find the forest glade.
---Kizer
When I go back to earth. . .
If men should pass above . . .
My dust will find a voice
To answer them aloud . . .
---Teasdale
Kizer's poem builds on and develops the key
sentimentist technique of self-transformation with
an ironic tone and a capaciously surrealistic
structure. She answers her foremothers in homage
and defiance, heightening and intensifying the
grotesqueness and pathos of the sentimentists'
traditional ways of self-transformation.
"A Muse of Water," the poem Kizer chose to
conclude Mermaids in the Basement, is a
manifesto, a defense of the woman poet whose
brimming creativities have been drained by
centuries of service as muse, not to mention
mother:
So flows in dark caves, dries away,
What would have brimmed from bank to bank,
Kissing the fields you turned to stone,
Under the boughs your axes broke.
And you blame streams for thinning out,
Plundered by man's insatiate want?
In the ironic tradition of female apologia such
as Anne Bradstreet's "Prologue," "A Muse of Water"
concludes with an ironically humble
threat:
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.
Women have been robbed of their deepest
inspirational power, but nonetheless, they hold
depths capable of drowning a man who comes to them
for inspiration, either as poet seeking a muse, or
as reader seeking poetry---and it doesn't take much
depth to drown a man. In this conclusion, Kizer
turns a Bradstreet-like act of self-deprecation
into a chilling and bitter taunt that is also a
triumphant assertion of the survival of women's
poetry.
At a time when works by women are reprinted most
often out of a sense of historical curiosity, Kizer
compiled her eclectic little book called 100
Great Poems by Women only in the name of poetic
excellence, editing a true poet's anthology. Among
Kizer's hundred are poems reflecting her own taste
for satire and political verse, such as Anne
Finch's "Trail All Your Pikes" and Sarah Cleghorn's
famous and bitter quatrain "The golf links lie so
near the mill / That almost every day / The
laboring children can look out / And see the men at
play"; poems that, like some of Kizer's finest,
celebrate friendships between women; and a number
of excellent poems that protest women's social and
political position over the centuries.
Ever the anti-Teasdale, Kizer made a conscious
decision to showcase poems on "gender-neutral"
topics: "this anthology is bent on showing what
women can write about besides romance and
domesticity." But she does not hesitate to include
a type of verse that is generally much more
devalued these days: public poetry. Kizer's
anthology juxtaposes familiar chestnuts, including
Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus," Felicia Homans's
"Stately Homes of England," and Julia Ward Howe's
"Battle Hymn of the Republic," with surprising gems
from much obscurer writers, many of them anonymous
or pseudonymous.
After decades of reading and loving women's
poetry, I can honestly say that reading through
Kizer's anthology gave me the most palpable sense I
have had of how many, many, many women have written
poems before me, and with what seriousness,
variety, and skill. This is not surprising in view
of Kizer's relation with the sentimentist
tradition. I am grateful that of all contemporary
women poets, she was the one to edit this book,
just as I am grateful to her for keeping alive for
me a link with women's poetic past. As a younger
woman poet who has grown to be nourished by the
women's poetic tradition daily, I can't imagine
what my own work would be like if Kizer had not had
the courage to embrace that tradition in all its
sorrow, irony, and desire to please, its beauty,
responsibility, and strength.
Annie Finch is co-editor of Carolyn
Kizer: Perspectives on her Life & Work,
editor of A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form
by Contemporary Women, After New Formalism,
co-editor, with Kathrine Varnes, of An
Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate
the Diversity of Their Art, and author of
The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in
American Free Verse. Eve is her
collection of poems. She teaches English and
Creative Writing at Miami University of
Ohio.
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