Yin: New Poems

by Carolyn Kizer

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Poetry, Literature

85 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1984

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

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably my favorite Carolyn Kizer collection.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in 2014, I read Kizer's complete collection of poems Cool, Calm, and Collected and was underwhelmed. I gave it only 2 stars. But as part of a project exploring the most notable students of Theodore Roethke, I decided to revisit her and decided on this book, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. I'll say that I like her better in smaller doses. And I can accept that this book won the Pulitzer (a stance I don’t often take).

What did I discover on this second try with Kizer? I was looking for similarities between her poetry and that of Roethke but I didn't see much, which is fine. I believe she became his student later in her life so perhaps she was not as impressionable as some of his other students. Who she does remind me of is Sharon Olds or even Diane Seuss. Those two crossed with A.E. Stallings (sans the formalism). Kizer can get down and dirty in her descriptions but her privilege, which she is open about, makes me suspect that, although she's experienced the same pain and disappointment as less fortunate people, she sometimes talks of down and dirty things she has no direct experience with. That said, self-deprecating humor is part of her charm so when she is less than complimentary about others it just seems part of her approach to much of life.

This book does quite a bit of feeling its way across generations of women. We learn about her impressive mother, a little about one of her daughters–and also about her father, about her disappointing marriage to one man and idyllic marriage to another. Despite touching on a lot of personal relationships, none of the poems come across as confessional. But she does like to complain and makes fun of this tendency in the poem about her idyllic marriage which bemoans the lovely husband as being the end of further subjects for her poetry.

She also includes poems that seem to be abstracting experiences into mythology such as the bizarre "Semele Recycled," "The Copulating Gods," and "The Dying Goddess." She has nods to other poets: Sappho, Nicanor Parra (who I don’t think I’ve ever heard another poet mention), Basho, and Richard Shelton (a poet known primarily in AZ). She translates Tu Fu. She has a long poem from the point of view of the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson during their final years on Samoa (unfortunately there is no epigraph to give someone who doesn’t know about RLS to know what’s being referred to).

My favorite poem was Running Away from Home, a poem which sequentially roasts each state of the Northwest: Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Montana. It's sort of an anti-Howl in the sense that it's not railing against the harm done to geniuses but rather against the hodge-podge of rather awkward, down and out people navigating their lives barely able to stay sane that saturate this region, the rural underbelly. There's no indication they would have done better placed elsewhere. She seemed to be having a lot of fun with language at everyone's expense.

In the end I guess it's the variety that made this a fairly fast read and one I liked, though I still can't say I like Kizer’s poetic sensibility overall.

[Rosa Tolava · Rating 2 out of 5]

El título se refiere a "(in Chinese philosophy) the passive female principle of the universe, characterized as female and sustaining and associated with earth, dark, and cold".
Si bien se puede apreciar el tenor feminista de los poemas, y otros temas como la mitología y la literatura y cultura oriental, no fue de mi agrado la lectura de este libro. Sólo me gustaron "Food of love" y los siguientes poemas.

"And here it is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the river
and are sweet and wholesome once more.
We kneel side by side in the sand;
we worship each other in whispers.
But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,
the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,
and passion, its bloody labor,
its birth and rebirth and decay"("SEMELE RECYCLED").

IN THE FIRST STANZA,
first, I tell you who I am:
shadowed, reflective, small,
pool in an unknown glade.
It is easy to he a poet,
brim with transparent water.
hi autumn, the leaves blow down
over the ruffled surfaee,
sink to rest, then resume their eyele.
hi the seeond stan/a. you laugh,
skipping pebbles aeross my surfaee
charmed by the spreading circles.
In the trees' perpetual twilight
you are alone with the poet.
Gently, you shake your head.
You know me as hirbulent ocean
clouded with thunder and drama.
hi the third stanza, I die.
Still, 1 insist on composing
as my throes go on and on.
I clench the pen in my teeth
making those furious scratches
that you will see, much later, as a graceful calligraphy:
drift of sails that sketch my horizon.
My hands, in the fourth stanza,
with the agonized clutch of the dying,
draw your hand beneath the covers.
I beg you to travel my body
till you find the forest glade.
Then your hand, like a leaf in autumn,
is pulled into the pool.
The rest of you doesn't believe it.
The fifth stanza begins
with water, and quiet laughter.
Then I die, I really die.
You pick up this piece of paper.
You read it aloud and explain me,
my profile cast in prose.
It drops from your hand like a leaf.
This is all part of the cycle.

Then, in the final stanza,
I tell you who I am.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although there were some really amazing poems in this collection, mostly found in Section III: Dreams and Friends (October, 1973 being my favorite), I found the work inconsistent in both style and voice, which I found disjointed and off-putting. But I also cop to the fact that I love a strong through-line in poetry collections and this just wasn't for me.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the 10 books of poetry that I pulled off my shelves to read this year, books I bought along the way but never read. It's hard to not berate myself while reading these books, to be irriated with myself for coming so late to something so marvelous. Instead, I want to congratulate me for finally reading Kizer who the literary world already knows is well worth it. I marked about 15 poems with little flags for future study or because they touched me uniquely: "The Blessing," "Three from Tu Fu," and "Afternoon Happiness" to name a few.

Kizer shows me the range of subject matter poetry can address, the opportunity to celebrate, to fictionalize, to apologize. She shows me how to use language and meter and shape to give meaning. She shows me how much fun can be invested in a single poem.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a little hit or miss for me, but when it hit it was great! I was looking for a feminist poet and while that doesn't begin to entirely describe Kizer I enjoyed her work.

[Barb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only like a few of these poems. The rest have not aged well. I cannot believe this won the pulitzer. Her later work is much better.

[Michelle Hoogterp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this

[Frederick Gault · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gripping. When was the last time you picked up a book of poetry and couldn't put it down?