Reading poet Joanne Kyger book of poems, As Ever.
Could not find online poem in book, "12.29 & 30 (Pan as the Son of Penelope)" by Joanne Kyger, and too long to type. But came across this:
Night Palace
'The best thing about the past
is that it's over'
when you die.
you wake up
from the dream
that's your life.
Then you grow up
and get to be post human
in a past that keeps happening
ahead of you
(--Poem by Joanne Kyger, OCTOBER 2003
Learned she was married to Gary Snyder from 1960-65 and write alongside the Beats (Ginsburg, Creeley, Kerouac, Whelan).
This from a literary magazine:
In person, Kyger offers wide-ranging and inspired conversation. Through years of practice of poetry and Zen, as well as attending the manners and courtesies of village life in Bolinas, she has managed to compress in pragmatic fashion questions or statements that clear the air in an instant. “I don’t care what someone ‘knows’ or ‘feels,’” she said to me once in conversation about poetry, “I want to know what’s happening.” I repeat this because it impressed me deeply, and because it reveals much that is true of the new narrative forms that came out of the 1960s and ‘70s in and around Bolinas. Particularly, the statement draws attention to Kyger’s own careful, perceptive nature, and her uses of poetry. She exemplifies a faith in the life-long process of self-relation, trusting in the poem and its instantaneous recognition in the projective field articulated by Charles Olson. Unlike Olson, however, she focuses on events and happenings, moving herself out of the way as a kind of recording instrument. Philip Whalen, from whom she learned much too, created a similar ethos of detachment in his work. His finished poems, however, are more like seamless, well-crafted collages from notebooks. They are full of humor and detached observations of diverse physical and creative environments inter-textually stitched to delight and tease readers with exemplary wisdom and bardic aplomb. Kyger’s work by contrast is personally intimate, faithful to specific moments in time and attendant to the many spirits or moods of landscape. The real difference, perhaps, is the frame of attention, and the spirits guiding it. Whalen’s genius for quotation and for extending the context of the poem contrasts starkly with Kyger’s bright and socially centered attention to the immediate context of composition, as it is known through her words rather than through the quotes of others.
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Her attention to place makes her an intimate observer of every day life in her beloved Bolinas. Her engagement with organic life processes is mirrored by the visual construction of her poems on the page, where lines often are set out into the space of the page rather than stacked along the left-hand margin. In this sense visually she is close to Pound and Williams, using the page as a kind of painting or glyph for the ease and pleasure of the eye. “I saw the page as some kind of tapestry and voice glyph,” she said in a 1997 interview,[12] echoing concerns for the poem that have been with her from her first book, The Tapestry and the Web. “When you move your line to the right, the lesser the impact of the line, the voice. The whole movement and rhythm on the page give us instruction as to voice and phrasing and import of what’s going on.” These concerns for her own creative environments reveal an openness to phenomena, an openness that withholds judgment in order to experience the moment through several perspectives. She is adamant too in stressing that anything can become part of a person’s poetic practice. “Your dreams are important,” she said, “your humorous life is important, your cooking life is important, your friendships, the dialogues you assume, the news that comes from within, the news that comes from out there. There’s such a wide variety of ‘things’ that go on. It’s important not to get stuck on any one of these as being the ‘I’ that writes. Being able to report, as it were, from all these areas of life and see that they’re equally ‘valid’ and ‘important.’ Nothing is more or less important than anything else. An egalitarian sense of what it’s like to be a human. What being alive is like.
—from Joanne Kyger and the Narrative of Every Day, by Dale Smith, Jacket Magazine, October 2007
