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
dust poet imposing
A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust,
museums color important
In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.
passion wonder apprehension
We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.
mirrors needs faces
Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
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.
wheat wrote
As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.
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.
discovered easier
I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.