In the coming weeks, we will publish a series of tributes to Poetry Northwest founding editor, Carolyn Kizer. Weâll post additional material throughout the spring: for additional features in the series, please visit here. We are very pleased to open with an appreciation by Katrina Roberts of Kizer’s hard, sweet music.
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Iâve long been struck by the final gesture in Carolyn Kizerâs poem âLines to Accompany Flowers for Eve,â addressed to one whoâs tried to take her own life: âNo Way of knowing its strength, or your own, / Until you lie quite still, your perfect limbs / In meditation: the spirit rouses, flutters / Like a handkerchief at a cell window, signaling, / Self-amazed, its willingness to endure.â Weâve recently lost important poetsâgreat womenâto suicide. Their tragedy reminds us the world is hard, indeed, and unfair to so many women in countless ways. And also that an individual life, even one apparently lovely, is simply inscrutable. Iâm buoyed at least by the sustaining insights these poets have left in their stunning, tumultuous wakes.
Kizer has long said what she wants in a language that defies convention and expectation. She knows endurance. Admittedly, Iâm drawn to poems of hers that speak not directly about gender politics, rather about that age-old mind-body question⊠but thatâs my own leaning: how spirit inhabits the meat-world; what of an ever-after? Bearing children has heightened such questions for me, deepened each vantage; Iâm grateful for anyoneâs translation of the quotidian into the miraculous. Thereâs such savageness around the globe, endless hardships of body and mind the human spirit must wake to and withstandâ experiences staggering to contemplate, yet made real by those who write some semblance of them into existence for the rest of us. Kizer has always looked unflinchingly at the hard cold facts of the world as it is, even as she pushes it towards that sweet music it might become.
Similarly, I appreciate Kizerâs work in linguistic translation (from the Chinese, Yiddish, Macedonian, Urdu, etc.) and how her engagement in this enterprise prompts her expansive voice to find resonant corridors in the echo of the ghazal, for instance, appropriated for her poem âShalimar Gardens.â One of poetryâs great pleasures is precisely the power of an individual formal choice to underscore complex intentionâhow idea and gut sense can inhabit and construct (through provocative syntax) the fascinating rooms (stanzas) of a poemâs architectural (and visual) argument. Listen to the satisfying sonic transitivity of its opening three couplets:
In the garden of earth a square of water;
In the garden of waters a spirit stone.
Here music rises: Barbelo! Barbelo!
Marble pavilions border the water.
Marble petals of lotus bevel
The edge of the pool.
The lilting anapestic/iambic climbing in the first couplet draws me, then gives way to the torque of trochaic/dactylic falling meters at odds with the word ârisesâ in the next few lines (underscoring that divide between a bodyâs gravity and ethereal music), and then returns, up-swinging, to offer aural resolution as all aligns along the poolâs edge. I like the concision here, the measured eye, the mindâs cartographer charting (in reined lines) the geometrically stunning space of terraces, basins, pathways; and the simple way Kizer invokes a notion of substance and ornamentationâfretwork and fruit trees, sheen of pale polished stone, plashing of hundreds of fountainsâout of which inspiration ascends in song.
More descending in the penultimate couplet seems apt, as do consonant pairings: âHere spirit is married to matter. / We are the holy hunger of matter for form,â before the poet, recalling the traditional maqta, summons herself (with the takhallis): âKizer, youâŠâ and, in a striking reversal (rather than sculptor carving rough rock to release the spirit within)âclaims (dramatically) instead to âEnter into the dark world forever / To die again, into the living stone.â Here is the poetâs own deathâalbeit (and thankfully!) in a world made only of wordsâtranslated into eternal reincarnation through that which is most elemental.
My mind spins within my skull; Iâm grateful to Kizer for her provocation, for her willingness to affix the laser beam of her eye to that which is directly before her, as a record of her singular perspective in our shared world, and for the sustained lamentation and communiquĂ© of her song.
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Katrina Roberts has published four books of poems: Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; and How Late Desire Looks. She is the Mina Schwabacher Professor in English & the Humanities at Whitman College. Her work appears in places such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets. Â She and her husband, Jeremy Barker, founded Tytonidae Cellars and the Walla Walla Distilling Company in southeast Washington State, where they live on a small farm with their three young children.
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If youâd like to con/tribute â the remembrance of an encounter with Kizer or her work, a close reading of a poem, a letter to the editor, etc. â please write us at: editors@poetrynw.org, with the subject line “Kizer tribute.”