Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 by Carolyn Kizer

by Carolyn Kizer

Selected as a "Best Book of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times and Booklist magazine, and winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award, Cool, Calm, and Collected is a tour de force from one of the nation's premier poets. For four decades, Carolyn Kizer has been one of the most influential, controversial, and recognizable figures in American poetry. A feminist practically before the term existed, she has never been afraid to say what is on her mind, writing poems infused with sexual politics, social awareness, and literary irreverence.

Cool, Calm, and Collected was reprinted four times in cloth and became one of Copper Canyon Press's bestselling titles. It features new poems, work from all of Kizer's previous volumes, translations "from a dizzying number of poets" (New York Times), and several prose pieces, including "Pakistan Journal" and "My Good Father."

. . . We women,Outside, breathing dust, are still the Other. The evening sun goes down; time to fix dinner. "You women have no major phiolosophers." We know. But we remain philosophic, and say with the Saint, "Let me enter my chamber and sing my songs of love." -from "Pro Femina"

"We cannot do without Kizer and never could-here are four decades of compelling reasons why."-Los Angeles Times

"Carolyn Kizer is a national treasure."-San Francisco Chronicle

"The book will appeal to poetry lovers and activists of all stripes."-Publishers Weekly

"No library should be without this collection."-Booklist (starred review)

Carolyn Kizer, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, was educated at Sarah Lawrence College. She co-founded Poetry Northwest; served as the first director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts; was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; and has been a poet-in-residence at Columbia, Stanford, and Princeton. Kizer lives in Sonoma, California.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism

Paperback

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born in 1925 in Spokane, Washington. Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizer’s childhood was suffused with poetry. Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of [John] Keats; mother went for [Walt] Whitman. No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to. But I think my choices of [Gertrude] Stein and [George Bernard] Shaw show that my tastes were different. I remember that when I was eleven or twelve I came storming home from school demanding, ‘Why didn't you ever tell me about [Alexander] Pope and [John] Dryden?’ They were stunned. Our library, copious as it was, didn't contain the works of either. These were lasting influences. I have continued to prefer, and write, poems that have what you might call ‘a sting in the tail.’ Add Catullus and Juvenal. I adored wit, irony, and intellectual precision.” Kizer’s work is known for just those traits. From her early poems in The Ungrateful Garden (1961) to the Pulitzer-prize winning Yin: New Poems (1984) to such later works as Pro Femina (2000), which satirizes liberated women writers by mimicking the hexameter used by the ancient misogynist poet Juvenal, and her retrospective Calm, Cool, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001), Kizer’s work has received acclaim for its intellectual rigor, formal mastery, and willingness to engage with political realities. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Carolyn Kizer is a kind of institution... For over 40 years, she's made poems with a stern work ethic of literary thought and linguistic scrupulousness.” In an interview with Allan Jalon for the Los Angeles Times, Kizer described her own style: “I’m not a formalist, not a confessional poet, not strictly a free-verse poet.” Jalon described Kizer as, “Tough without being cold, sometimes satirical (she’s a great admirer of Alexander Pope),” and noted that “her work expresses a worldly largeness that repeatedly focuses on the points at which lives meet. ‘That’s my subject,’” concluded Kizer. “No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.”

Reviews

[Carol Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

splendidly vigorous poetry, lots about what it's like to be woman

[Frederick Gault · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the great poets of our time.

[Laura]

Nice collection to revisit again another time.

[Greg Bem · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kizer's Collected is almost entirely disappointing. It is saved by the amazing Pakistan journal, and many of the translations. Most of her own poems are incredibly unsupported. There needs to be critical commentary and editorial notes in work that is as dense and referential as her own. I hope someone puts out a Complete works volume, or a slightly better organized Collected, in the future.

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff; selections from the long life of of a American poet.

[Ray Greenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

An inspiration. Really reached me and expanded my thinking.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A large collection of the poets work that I have enjoyed reading over the past year.