Joanne Kyger
POETRY READING & WORKSHOP
Reading: Saturday, March 2, 7pm, St. Philips Church, West Gallery
NE Corner of Campbell and River
$5 admission / $3 students
Workshop: Sunday, March 3, 1:30-3:00 pm
Poetry Center, University of Arizona
1216 N. Cherry Ave. (1½ blocks north of Speedway)
Participation fee: $10
Presented by POG and CHAX PRESS
with assistance from Arizona Teachings, Inc., University of Arizona Poetry Center, and friends.
Please call Chax Press at 620-1626 for information.
Joanne Kyger, a native Californian, is the author of 20 books of poetry, the most recent being Again: Poems 1989-2000 from La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, N.M. Her Selected Poems is forthcoming from Penguin Books in 2002. As a poet, Kyger has been associated with the Beat writers and the San Francisco Renaissance. She has lived on the coast north of San Francisco for the past 30 years. She teaches at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and the New College of California, in San Francisco.
Click here to read a couple of poems by Joanne Kyger
She’s one of our hidden treasures — the poet who really links the Beats, the Spicer Circle, the Bolinas poets, the New York School, and the Language poets, and the only poet who can be said to do all of the above.— Ron Silliman
Our literary histories of the last quarter of the twentieth century were all written far too soon — in fact, before the period had even been lived. When this history is finally rewritten, as it will have to be, Joanne Kyger will assume a central place. She is one of the finest practioners of the art of poetry conceived (after Whitman and Williams, among others) as the preservation of experience in language. The scale of Kyger’s poetry is human existence; spoken language provides its measure; the animating force is curiosity. Out of these materials she has accomplished something magnificent and beautiful. She has many peers but no betters— Ben Friedlander
In stressing the self as a phenomenon, as appearing, being there - Joanne Kyger's work encourages one to move beyond the tendency to see two types of poets (women and men), which in feminist scholarship has produced a particular, unfavorable model of literary productions. Her work encourages one to see women writers as gesturing outward - in the same generous sense that Charles Olson saw Robert Creeley as a "figure of outward." This «Jacket» feature ventures in that direction with an array of critical readings, none of them particularly attuned to gender but all of them responsive to the powerful insistence of Joanne Kyger's cultivated line and ear, and the graceful persistence of a continually evolving poetic, one that lets the self go through listening to what's there - from the intimate notebook page and the company it keeps to larger temporalities and geographies - to create a self, broad and sweeping.
— Linda Russo