Paris Review Interview with Carolyn Kizer
INTERVIEWER:
I know you�ve written about this, but could we begin with the beginning, how you became a poet?
KIZER:
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. A sort of intellectual seduction: there I am, lying on the sofa breathing with difficulty, while Father pours Keats into the porches of my ear. If Daddy had only read Keats�s letters! They�re so wonderful, but Keats is someone you can�t let yourself be influenced by. There�s that interesting group of poets who are fatal to your style: I�d say Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. The Waley led me to my own interest in Chinese and Chinese translations, which has been a major theme in my life. And Whitman, of course, I idolize, though I�m more attracted to metrical verse. Meter is as natural as breathing or the heartbeat. I think my childhood asthma had a lot to do with my consciousness of the breath unit�in a sense I�ve never really taken breathing for granted.
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. As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south. Mother used to say that Spokane was �a walled town,� quoting Ralph Adams Cram; these walls, to her, were the wheat fields to the south, the forests to the east and north, and the desert of the Grand Coulee to the west. I forget what were supposed to be the virtues of a walled town, but it was a metaphor for my mother�s claustrophobia�trapped in this extremely provincial town after living all her adult life in New York and San Francisco (until she met and married my father in her forties). I know that I, too, felt that isolation, with radical parents in an archconservative city�and I also felt trapped, but by the excessive concern of elderly parents with one lone child. Poetry, then, was chiefly a means of escape from a huge, rah-rah high school, from Spokane and from them.
INTERVIEWER:
But you don�t think of poetry as escape now, do you?
KIZER:
No, I think what I really want to escape from now is what is happening to my country�the anger, the fear, the knee-jerk conservatism. Which is probably why we bought an apartment in Paris a few years ago. As a child of the New Deal, politically active since I was twelve or so, I never thought I would feel this way! Now poems seem to be social commentary as much as anything; principally, they are focused on human interaction, which one would think is more of a novelist�s concern.
�more at The Paris Review
I know you�ve written about this, but could we begin with the beginning, how you became a poet?
KIZER:
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. A sort of intellectual seduction: there I am, lying on the sofa breathing with difficulty, while Father pours Keats into the porches of my ear. If Daddy had only read Keats�s letters! They�re so wonderful, but Keats is someone you can�t let yourself be influenced by. There�s that interesting group of poets who are fatal to your style: I�d say Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. The Waley led me to my own interest in Chinese and Chinese translations, which has been a major theme in my life. And Whitman, of course, I idolize, though I�m more attracted to metrical verse. Meter is as natural as breathing or the heartbeat. I think my childhood asthma had a lot to do with my consciousness of the breath unit�in a sense I�ve never really taken breathing for granted.
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. As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south. Mother used to say that Spokane was �a walled town,� quoting Ralph Adams Cram; these walls, to her, were the wheat fields to the south, the forests to the east and north, and the desert of the Grand Coulee to the west. I forget what were supposed to be the virtues of a walled town, but it was a metaphor for my mother�s claustrophobia�trapped in this extremely provincial town after living all her adult life in New York and San Francisco (until she met and married my father in her forties). I know that I, too, felt that isolation, with radical parents in an archconservative city�and I also felt trapped, but by the excessive concern of elderly parents with one lone child. Poetry, then, was chiefly a means of escape from a huge, rah-rah high school, from Spokane and from them.
INTERVIEWER:
But you don�t think of poetry as escape now, do you?
KIZER:
No, I think what I really want to escape from now is what is happening to my country�the anger, the fear, the knee-jerk conservatism. Which is probably why we bought an apartment in Paris a few years ago. As a child of the New Deal, politically active since I was twelve or so, I never thought I would feel this way! Now poems seem to be social commentary as much as anything; principally, they are focused on human interaction, which one would think is more of a novelist�s concern.
�more at The Paris Review
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| Carolyn Kizer |
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