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Poetry. For decades, Joanne Kyger has played a crucial role in California's poetry scene. Her poetry has been influenced by her studies in Zen Buddhism and her connection to the poets of Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat Generation. Ron Silliman describes Kyger's poetry as a point of convergence for all "post-avant" literary tendencies the later half of the 20th Century: "You can hear her influence everywhere, from Naropa, to the later generations of the New York School, to Language poetry. Get a fix on Joanne Kyger and a half century of American poetry suddenly comes clearly into focus." This latest collection may serve as the definitive one, highlighting an excellent sampling of her work. ... Read more

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Ah! The Best, The Fiercest
Joanne Kyger's poetry is the best. So Californian! Her sense of the immediate, and her deep mirth (even when writing elegies for friends and writers) are a tonic against overly theoretical (or, overly slack) poetry. She's also accessible, and not in an annoying way, like Billy Collins or whatever, that boring type of poetry. Her materials are familiar, but her concerns are eternal. ... Read more

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Hungry to explore Zen and make the discoveries that would shape a lifetime of poetry, Joanne Kyger left for Japan in her twenties and returned four years later ready to carve out a substantial niche in San Francisco's Beat poetry movement. Whether studying under Zen teacher Ruth Fuller Sakaki or meeting with the Dalai Lama (who at 27 "lounged on a velvet couch like a gawky adolescent in red robes"), her journals are witty, amusing, and intelligent, in this fascinating look at the art of poetry and portrait of the counterculture abroad. ... Read more

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Sei Shonagon updated
This book reminds me of Sei Shonagon, but the cast of characters is often well-known Beat writers.Kyger was married to Beat saint Gary Snyder at the time, but she is iconoclastic in regards to presenting him here.The arc of the book is their love story -- beginning with a shy and rather impressed Kyger and ending with a rather loud and irreverent Kyger.Early on she worships Snyder, but then he knocks her down and splits her head open on a wood table when she refuses to do the dishes.He is surly throughout the book, and given to bad moods, and kicks her at least twice.

Kyger gets it all down.

Beat saint Allen Ginsberg grabs his food at the communal dining hour and shoves his face full without waiting for others to be served.Orlovsky is shoving drugs in his face every moment that he can.

This is a funny book that knocks out stereotypes left and right.In one or two sentences she undoes the career of Paul Blackburn, for instance.And all the while she is musing on the possibility of a female literature, and what it might consist of -- something for which she had no clear legacy in American but the Japanese writers of the Heian period such as Sei Shonagon appear to have given her the inspiration needed.

This is a very good book for those who are tired of the Beats self-sanctification, and want a bit of humorous and unsparing insight into their world. ... Read more

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Poetry. Published in an edition of 1500 copies in 1975 by Big Sky in Bolina, California, ALL THIS EVERY DAY includes one of Kyger's most familiar poems, "September." ... Read more

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This collection of Joanne Kyger's work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger is a poet of place, with a strong voice-delicate, graceful, and never wasteful; her poems explore themes of friendship, love, community, and morality and draw on Native American myth as well as Asian religion and philosophy. Kyger's love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of the everyday. Edited with a foreword by Michael Rothenberg, and with an introduction by poet David Meltzer, this book is a marvelous overview of a wonderfully challenging and important poet. ... Read more

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AGAIN: Poems 1989-2000Joanne Kyger160 pages6 x 9 inchesISBN 1-888809-25-6 $16.00

Shaped by an effortless breath line, Joanne Kyger's poetry is gifted with exquisite sensory awareness, a landscape painter's eye, and friendly compassion. It conducts an intimate debate on the process of language, always with a wonderful sense of humor, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes excoriating the bad behavior of miscreants and proponents of a false culture. AGAIN: Poems 1989-2000, a long-awaited collection, spans a decade of daily life, deaths, seasons, bird migrations, journeys--and the who, what, where, even the why of conscious human puttering. Each poem finds its own form as well as place in the accumulative totality of the "book." Kyger's work continues to be an ongoing narrative, "the story time makes in a life," wise talk, notations and gossip. To read these poems is to sink deeply and fly gracefully at the same time--and suddenly discover your own life talking back. An active presence in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene for forty years, Joanne Kyger was one of the acknowledged female "Beat" poets (although she herself dislikes that limiting designation), she has been an inspiration to countless other writers, women as well as men, the young as well as her peers.She is a practicing Buddhist, and her poetry radiates the shapely art of a shapely mind. ... Read more

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It's not a poem, no matter what the cover says
Why do I despise this book? Bad marketing. Had it been marketed as a retelling of a Native American creation myth, hand-bound and illustrated and in general a gorgeous piece of the chapbook-maker's craft, I'd probablyhave liked it despite my general dislike of Kyger. Sure, the pacing ispedestrian and the language is unexceptional, but we need more retellingsof various cultures' creation myths to draw on. (I'm serious about this, Ican't get enough of them.) But was it marketed that way? Of course not.This... is a LONG POEM! Uh, sorry, no. It's not a poem, and in all honestyit's not all that long, either; I got through it in about half an hour. Andwhile reading about Coyote and his propensity for flinging vulture feathersabout is right up my alley, a good bit of remarketing is needed here. And arewrite probably wouldn't hurt. "The people began to walk around andfind things to eat/ For now they could see." Uh, yeah. Pass the salt,please. ... Read more

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Memory, solitude, and the passage of time, inhabit these lyrical lines filled with the precise ironiesssof a "spiritual life in the woods." These poems, written as an elegy after the recent death of a friend, resound with a deep attachment to nature and friendship. ... Read more

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This anthology presents material selected from the collection of Angel Hair magazine and books edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh between 1966 and 1978. Included are substantial sections of writing--in some cases entire books--from an impressive range of poets including Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Hannah Weiner, Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer, Kenward Elmslie, Tom Clark, Joanne Kyger, Bill Berkson, Ted Greenwald, Lorenzo Thomas, John Wieners, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett, as well as Waldman and Warsh, among many others. From the nascent St. Mark's Poetry Project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Bolinas and Boulder, Angel Hair published an idiosyncratic cross-section of innovative writing in distinctive format, becoming one of the longest-lived and most influential publishers on the small press scene. The anthology of literary writings is supplemented with brief memoirs by more than twenty writers, and the book also includes an annotated checklist by Aaron Fischer and Steven Clay that comprises a citation and photograph of each of the approximately eighty books, magazines, broadsides and catalogues issued by the Press. ... Read more

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Word count: 1542. ... Read more