Cool Calm & Collected Poems 1960-2000

by Carolyn Kizer

Sexual politics, social awareness, literary irreverence—Carolyn Kizer is the indisputable grande dame of American letters. Never afraid to say what is on her mind, in her poetry Kizer has always done so with both grace and flair. For four decades she has been one of the most influential, controversial, and recognizable figures in American as an early feminist, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, as a Roethke student, as the first director of the National Endowment for the Arts’s literary program, as a member of the board of The Academy of American Poets (from which she resigned, in protest, in 1999), and as the founding editor of the influential Poetry Northwest. Cool, Calm & Collected is a "new and collected" volume by one of Copper Canyon Press’s all-time bestselling poets. It gathers new poems together with work from all of Kizer’s eight previous volumes, several of which have been unavailable for many years. from "Pro Femina" From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.
How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie
The clinical sobriquet hangs cod-piece coveters.
Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.
Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices
Which had grown, in part, from having been set
Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted
To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner—
"Think I’m crazy or drunk?"—his emotional stake in us,
As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those
Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it… Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington in 1925 and currently lives in Sonoma, California. She is the author of eight previous books of poetry, two collections of essays, and has edited several anthologies and volumes of translations. Her collection Yin won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. Also available by Carolyn Kizer
Harping On
PB $12.00, 1-55659-115-2 • CUSA
HC y $22.00, 1-55659-114-4 • CUSA
Mermaids in the Basement
PB $10.00, 0-914742-81-7 • CUSA
On Poems and Poets
PB $12.00, 1-55659-045-8 • CUSA
Yin
PB

Genres: Poetry, Feminism

520 pages, Hardcover

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.

[j e rodriguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

"And we erase more and more of the world's terrible map; / How may we bear witness, as we should?"

[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.