Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Ashley Kizerwas an American poet of the Pacific Northwest whose works reflect her feminism. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth10 December 1925
CountryUnited States of America
behind classes climb excuse found gym high hill manage nice notebook poetry school settle sports spread till using wrote
I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.
exactly people
I've been enormously fortunate. People say, 'How do you feel about your reputation?' My real belief is that I have exactly the reputation I deserve... on the whole, I feel comfortable with myself.
letters mail stamp
I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back.
bad dylan hear people sort surprised thomas
I tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife.
australian charles dreams great harry history joseph learn learned named poems sarah sources
I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
arthur assist began heavy influences keats lifelong poems robinson sofa struggling whitman
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.
both brief change encounter
No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.
I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo.
discovered easier
I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano.
closer concerns environmental feminism locked nature organic women
Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives.
wheat wrote
As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.
crafts poet
Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.
simple intellectual able
She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good.
honesty believe needs
I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.