Joanne Kyger

Joanne Kyger (November 19, 1934 – March 22, 2017) was an American poet.

The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.

Although Kyger is often characterized as a prominent female Beat poet in the predominately male inner circle of Beat Generation writers, she never considered herself as belonging to the Beat movement.

Nor did she formally identify with any other movement; her work invokes various schools of poetry without belonging to any of them.

In Reconstructing the Beats, Amy L. Friedman calls Kyger "an important link between several major axes of American poetry and writing in the twentieth century."

Linda Russo, in the webzine Jacket's edition devoted to Kyger, notes that "there is no one way to talk about her work except as that of a singular individual."

Kyger's early poetry was influenced by Charles Olson's "projective verse" concept of letting breath and open construction, rather than rhyme and syntax, guide poetic composition.

This influence continued to shape her mature work.

Joanne Elizabeth Kyger was born on November 19, 1934, in Vallejo, California, to Jacob Kyger, a Navy captain, and Anne (Lamont) Kyger, a Santa Barbara, California, city employee of Canadian descent.

Kyger moved often, living in China, California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, until the age of 14, when the family (including Kyger's two sisters) settled in Santa Barbara.

Her parents separated permanently in 1949.

Kyger's first published poem appeared in her school's literary magazine when she was five.

At Santa Barbara High School, Kyger co-edited the features column of the school newspaper with Leland Hickman.

In 1952, she enrolled at Santa Barbara College (later University of California, Santa Barbara), where she studied philosophy and literature and started the school's first literary magazine.

Renowned critic Hugh Kenner introduced her to the works of Modernist poets, such as W. B. Yeats and William Carlos Williams, while Paul Wienpahl introduced her to the works of Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

Kyger moved to San Francisco 1957 at the age of 22, where she met Richard Brautigan, who introduced her to City Lights Bookstore and the bohemian neighborhood of North Beach.

Working in Brentano's bookstore in the City of Paris department store by day and sharing her poetry at The Place bar by night, Kyger became a part of the literary scene and she was invited to join the Sunday Meetings where she read her poems aloud.

In 1958, Kyger met Gary Snyder, whom she would marry in 1960.

Snyder introduced Kyger to Philip Whalen, and they became lifelong friends, sharing the sensibilities that defined their similar poetic styles.

Kyger's print debut, "Tapestry #3," appeared in Spicer's mimeographed magazine J No. 4 in 1959, and she gave her first public poetry reading on March 7, 1959, at the Beer and Wine Mission.

During this period she moved to the East-West House, a communal center for those interested in Asian studies, and studied with Shunryū Suzuki Roshi at the Sokoji Temple in Japantown.

On January 30, 1960, Kyger left California by ship to join Snyder in Kyoto, Japan.

Since Japanese customs frowned upon unmarried couples living together, they were married at the American Consulate in Kobe on February 23, three days after Kyger arrived in Japan, followed by a Zen marriage ceremony performed at Daitoku-ji in Kyoto five days later.

While living in Japan, Kyger wrote poetry, studied Buddhism with Ruth Fuller Sasaki at Ryosen-an—the zendo of the First Zen Institute's Kyoto branch, learned flower arranging, taught English, and acted in small roles in Japanese B movies.

In December 1961, Kyger and Snyder traveled to India with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky.

They met with the Dalai Lama in March 1962.

The following month, Kyger and Snyder continued their travels in Singapore, Vietnam, and Hong Kong.

In January 1964, Kyger left Snyder to his studies in Japan and returned alone, her marriage disintegrated, to San Francisco.

During this period, in addition to writing poems that would be included in her first book, Kyger recorded her travels in diaries, which were published in 1981 as The Japan and India Journals 1960–1964.

The autobiographical text—which chronicles, in part, her growing frustration with Snyder's expectations and Ginsberg's antics—is considered an important document of the Beat era, offering a rare female perspective on the male-centric movement.

In the foreword of the 2000 reissue of the book, Anne Waldman calls it "one of the finest books ever in the genre of 'journal writing'" and "a surprisingly (surreptitiously) feminist tract as well: woman artist struggles for identity and independence in the 1960s."

In a 2007 review of Kyger's book About Now: Collected Poems, Lewis MacAdams describes Kyger as from the "School of Backyard Poets, who look out their kitchen windows and see the universe."

Kyger's poems emerged from a daily literary practice of recording thoughts, events, and dreams.

Most of the poems are dated, either in the title or at the end.

Much like journals, they include everything from philosophical musings to the weather.

Themes—arising from her practice of Zen Buddhism, study of consciousness, explorations of ancient Greek and Native American mythologies, frequent travels to Mexico, observations of the natural landscape, and daily life in a small coastal town—continue from book to book, like installments in an autobiography.

In a 2010 interview Kyger says, "You want to make it so that someone could say it. I try to 'score' the lines for the page with that in mind, the breathing, the timing."

Unlike Olson, notes Dale Smith in his essay "Joanne Kyger and the Narrative of Every Day," Kyger "focuses on events and happenings, moving herself out of the way as a kind of recording instrument . . . faithful to specific moments in time and attendant to the many spirits or moods of landscape."

In a 2011 interview, Kyger says, "I think of notebook writing like a practice—I try and do it whether I have anything good or bad or interesting to say. And the chronology becomes the narrative, a history of a writing 'self.'"

In her 2015 notes from an earlier interview, Kyger recalls that the philosophers inspired her interest in Zen Buddhism: "Heidegger had come to the study of 'nothing.' Then I found D. T. Suzuki's book on Japanese Zen and I thought, Oh! this is where you go with this mind. This 'nothing' is really 'something.'" Kyger left the university in 1956, one freshman biology course short of a degree in philosophy and literature.