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As Ever: Selected Poems
This collection of Joanne Kyger's work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger is a poet of place, with a strong voice-delicate, graceful, and never wasteful; her poems explore themes of friendship, love, community, and morality and draw on Native American myth as well as Asian religion and philosophy. Kyger's love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of the everyday. Edited with a foreword by Michael Rothenberg, and with an introduction by poet David Meltzer, this book is a marvelous overview of a wonderfully challenging and important poet.
- GenresPoetry
336 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2002
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297 people want to read
About the author
Joanne Kyger
54 books21 followersJoanne Kyger was an American poet. She published more than twenty books of poetry and prose. Kyger lived in Bolinas, California since 1968, where she edited the local newspaper. She also occasionally taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University, in Boulder, Colorado.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 2, 2021
Compassion flows forth like the well of surrender.
Effective, the reins of radiation
from the nestling arms of comfort, cross legged, etc.
In which the obliteration of restraints
In which the obliteration of restraints
cause the room to become spaceless
hurtled far above the buildings.
The sad pavements covering trails by foot on earth,
the lone squirrel walking down Canal Street
looking for a tree,
While Art flourishes so energetically in people made
people made environments, Man's testimony
that the fuits of man's creation will be received by man
and paid, and hung upon, and listened to, and read,
and looked at
Held to be exhausted and deranged
Is this order ever ceaseless? Like the grey sky
the seedy bamboo, cypress in bloom with yellow
ladened boughs.
We have met the enemy and they are ours.
December 18, 2007
Kyger and Whalen are my two favorite Beat poets. Kyger's poetry is often understated, but no less powerful for that; the poetry has subtle modi operandi; it's generally as earthy and as canny as water (think of how water is described in the Tao de Ching). And yet somehow the uncanny appears, which is probably grace. Infinitely enduring, infinitely cycling through nature because of its willingness to go anywhere, her poetry ends on taking the feeling of divinity, the feeling of very gracious, very compassionate being. And out of this state of mind comes a reception to deep and abiding beauty in the commonplace. She is a spirit to accompany one. Her poetry walks side by side with you. The poetry is the record of a deep friendship with the entire human race. Rare.
May 8, 2021
As Ever: Selected Poems
Joanne Kyger
Though there are many delights in Joanne Kyger’s writing, I would like to begin with the joy she seems to take in washing her hair. Kyger said in our email correspondence that her poem Tuesday, October 28, 1969, Bolinas was written with a ‘tongue and cheek quality.” Having recently bought her house in Bolinas, Kyger’s exciting days of living in San Francisco and traveling abroad had been replaced by puttering around her new digs or walking into nearby Bolinas, a village of 300. Bored as she slowed down to meet the pace of her new, more rural life, Kyger responded with a poem of delicious comedic irony. Just as importantly Kyger was, in her own words, “discovering a simple voice to describe unadorned times.”
And now I’m looking forward / to washing my hair are the final lines of the poem mentioned above. What could be simpler and more pleasurable than water running through her hair? Unlike so many poets who write in a more personal mode, Kyger’s presence enlightens through her delight in small ironies and a dedication to compassion. To this must be added her abiding relationship to the natural world, and one of her major thematic pleasures is water.
Though I am speaking in the broadest terms without distinguishing fresh water / salt water / to swim in / to travel one / to wade in / to sit by, indeed all the permutations of water that we find in Kyger’s poems, this current is a powerful force in the upwellings of poetic language in her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, the poetic aftermath of her years in Japan and her travels through India.
‘When I returned a second time here there was an evening sun
and I swam ashore
and crouched in the thickets’
(As Ever p 32)
Like Odysseus, Kyger came home to San Francisco a second time. Having left her first husband Gary Snyder to return to the Bay Area, Kyger is both Odysseus and Penelope. Kyger’s past like their past is swept up in the present of this poem seen through the loutish behavior of suitors: quit eating the coffee cake and cottage cheese / put the lid on the peanut butter jar / sandwiches made of cucumber, stop eating the food! (As Ever p 35). Mixing the mythic, impersonal past into a very personal now, Kyger remains true to her orchestration of these voices and brings us their wisdom and joy.
Sometime shortly after Kyger writes her lovely poem to Ganesha, she moves to Bolinas. It is at this point that her myths stop leading her poems. Instead, they erupt in the fragments of her notebook or are assimilated into objects:
wood
sweep
ocean
music
It’s getting figured out
shells
wood
notes
Kyger is not a naïve empiricist who is confusing the word with the object. She is speaking of the relationship of words with the unexpected or paradoxical. The relationship can also be as clear as the word shell is to ocean. This poem’s koanic quality above all offers us a way of seeing the relationship of the various objects that arise from her unconscious and subconscious to each other. It is the honesty of her approach that is remarkable.
Some people are natural novelists. They exaggerate, twist, distort, and lie to bring some greater pleasure—and we hope some greater truth—to an audience. Kyger is a truth teller. Her instinct for the unvarnished truth as she sees it is laid out for all to see in Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964. Too often followers of the beats with whom she traveled - Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky - have gathered their material into counterculture hagiographies. Kyger, the only member of the group that was writing as they traveled, gives us brilliant observation, day in and day out, of the challenges inherent in these strong personalities trying to get along. Above she seeks the human and humane, even when it might show her in a less than perfect light.
Caught unprepared for a storm on Descheo Island in 1971, Kyger and her Caribbean cheechakos lose such precious items as Peter’s thesis, Margot’s hiking boot and Joanne’s cigarettes to the “30 feet dark silver monsters (As Ever 126)” of a serious tropical storm that inundate their campsite on the beach. Kyger’s impression as written in this poetic sequence is she won’t survive the island. She does but that’s the way she feels. It goes in the journal and on to the poem.
Though Kyger continued to travel, teach, to give readings and make an occasional trip to Mexico, her sense of Bolinas as her place and a love of the fine details of daily life become more and more intertwined. I want a smaller thing in mind / Like a good dinner / I’m tired of these big things happening / They happen to me all the time (As Ever p 134).
Of course Kyger’s Bolinas is anything but small. Through her garden, the Bolinas ecosystem, her relationship to people, friends or otherwise, her relationship to herself and religious / mythical / philosophical subjects such as the origin myths of her local Miwok Native Americans, Buddhism, Christianity or Descartes, Kyger informs us with day by daybook poetry that doesn’t declares where it is starting so much as it begins where it begins:
And I know this is my focus to meander
for days around the calendulas
now happily reseeded next to their roots
(As Ever p 194)
Of course Kyger’s poetic meanderings here are bhikkus, going where their spiritual longings take them. March 7, Wednesday Palenque 1985, one of two pieces from her collection Phenomenological in As Ever, revels in the presence of an ‘iridescent blue butterfly’ and fourteen toucans that are the joyful natural foreground that includes a river running below the ruins. Her ambivalence to human presence is noted when the quiet of the natural surroundings is broken by the excited North Americans who say, “What’s the name of this place?” sharing with us their joy and ignorance, and the noisy, aggressive Germans we find in the poem March 8, Thursday, also from Phenomenological. Here the human ruins are a backdrop most of all for “friend butterfly / is back in brown and red and yellow / the most beautiful guard / of this temple (As Ever, p 233).
Kyger is disturbed by nature’s lack of voice in the counting rooms of capitalism. Indeed, there is an implicit commitment to positive environment and political change that grows as politics in the United States goes from bad to worse. But as she grows older her sense of the present, the immediacy that is so omnipresent in her word is tempered by the loss of her friends, important figures in her life like Larry Eigner, Chogyam Trumpa. The wonderful piece on her once-close friend Richard Brautigan doesn’t need a title and doesn’t have one but for her journal date October 25. This remarkable elegy never tells us Brautigan dies, or that his life went off the tracks. Instead Kyger tells the reader she has finished reading a biography of Somerset Maugham, who dies at 92 “—terrified, lonely, crazy, no religion” (p 234) to suggest this in Brautigan.
A friend she’s giving a ride to, Charles Reeves, says “I think a tragedy has occurred” as Kyger and Reeves drive down a street called Terrace. As they pass Richard Brautigan’s house they see a police car in front of it. Joanne ends the poem: “Well he’s gone / away, maybe / a robbery . . . “. Maugham then suffers terrible before he dies, providing an intimation of tragedy that is not recognized in the poem. The only way a reader would know what happened to Brautigan is if they knew that October 25th was the day his body was found.
There is such great depth in all of Kyger’s elegies, much the same as the Reader experiences in October 25th. For Kyger, knowledge is never a blunt instrument.
Two formidable influences run through the course of Kyger’s work. The first is that of Charles Olson’s Projective Verse. One can feel how deeply Kyger has absorbed this critical document of English-language poetics in the United States in the 20th Century. Several important points came to mind when I reread this essay for this piece. Olson enjoins poets to always remember that energy is moved by the poet from the poem to the reader. This is the critical first step that Kyger has absorbed. Secondly, Kyger understands that the field of composition is a piece of paper, and the age we live in allows us to physically arrange a poem according to the demands of “the HEAD by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE (Olson 2) and “the HEART by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” Kyger has taken these words of Olson to heart:
It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man.
(Olson 4)
This passage is a cornerstone of Kyger’s poetics. Her poetry life has been dedicated to understanding the human relationship to nature and creating work larger than the oversized egos of human beings. But none of this in any way obscures her dedication to creating mythology poems, such as Jakata Tales, Adonis is Older than Jesus, or From the Life of Naropa, which are of which nod in the direction of one of her mentors, Robert Duncan, who spent most of his poetic life exploring these rich mythological grounds.
Ron Silliman wrote the poet and critic Linda Russo in 1998 that Kyger is “one of our hidden treasures -- the poet who really links the Beats, the Spicer Circle, the Bolinas poets, the NY School and the language poets, and the only poet who can be said to do all of the above.” High praise indeed. But aside from being a nexus of various schools, Kyger is above all a poet to be praised, who has followed her path so as to open a field of understanding for her readers, a field that is both on the page and physical present as the dry, yellow grasses of the Marin County hillside that children in my time slid down on cardboard.
This discussion of Kyger’s work began with her hair and sailed on to the sea that Kyger plied in her Odyssey as both Odysseus and Penelope. We find the world of water and mythology meet in her poem Ocean Parkway Gazing. In this poem, Kyger sits near the ocean listen to the waves and writing the first section of this poem. The writing here is of the natural in precise detail that sings of its presence. The second part tells us how this scene came to be and with what the journey will be mapped.
The voice describes the scene
looks up for reference
listens to two
songs sparrows carry out
their call
And response as the hissy light
waves roll over changing continuum.
The minutes go by the sea
The sea closes in
Up to the edge
of mythology.
Water and Mythology: two of Kyger’s abiding interests. No doubt she went home and washed her hair after writing this.
To balance this rather serious discussion, I leave you with the levity of the poem Phillip Whalen’s Hat. Somewhere I read that some people haven’t taken her seriously because of her comedic talents. Comments like this make me want to. . . well, when I hear something like this, I lose my sense of humor.
I woke up about 2:30 this morning and thought about Philip's
hat.
It is bright lemon yellow, with a little brim
all the way around, and a lime green hat band, printed
with tropical plants.
It sits on top
of his shaved head. It upstages every thing & every body.
He bought it at Walgreen's himself.
I mean it fortunately wasn't a gift from an admirer.
Otherwise he is dressed in soft blues. And in his hands
a long wooden string of Buddhist Rosary beads, which he keeps
moving. I ask him which mantra he is doing - but he tells me
in Zen, you don't have to bother with any of that.
You can just play with the beads.
If you would like to read more about Joanne Kyger, head over to the following site put together by the wonderful Linda Russo. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/...
Bibliography
e-mail to Linda Russo by Ron Silliman
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/...
Kyger, Joanne, As Ever. Penguin Books, New York, New York. 2002
Kyger, Joanne Phil Whalen’s Hat from Just Space: poems, 1979-1989 (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991) http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/philip...
Olson, Charles, Projective Verse http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn...
Joanne Kyger
Though there are many delights in Joanne Kyger’s writing, I would like to begin with the joy she seems to take in washing her hair. Kyger said in our email correspondence that her poem Tuesday, October 28, 1969, Bolinas was written with a ‘tongue and cheek quality.” Having recently bought her house in Bolinas, Kyger’s exciting days of living in San Francisco and traveling abroad had been replaced by puttering around her new digs or walking into nearby Bolinas, a village of 300. Bored as she slowed down to meet the pace of her new, more rural life, Kyger responded with a poem of delicious comedic irony. Just as importantly Kyger was, in her own words, “discovering a simple voice to describe unadorned times.”
And now I’m looking forward / to washing my hair are the final lines of the poem mentioned above. What could be simpler and more pleasurable than water running through her hair? Unlike so many poets who write in a more personal mode, Kyger’s presence enlightens through her delight in small ironies and a dedication to compassion. To this must be added her abiding relationship to the natural world, and one of her major thematic pleasures is water.
Though I am speaking in the broadest terms without distinguishing fresh water / salt water / to swim in / to travel one / to wade in / to sit by, indeed all the permutations of water that we find in Kyger’s poems, this current is a powerful force in the upwellings of poetic language in her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, the poetic aftermath of her years in Japan and her travels through India.
‘When I returned a second time here there was an evening sun
and I swam ashore
and crouched in the thickets’
(As Ever p 32)
Like Odysseus, Kyger came home to San Francisco a second time. Having left her first husband Gary Snyder to return to the Bay Area, Kyger is both Odysseus and Penelope. Kyger’s past like their past is swept up in the present of this poem seen through the loutish behavior of suitors: quit eating the coffee cake and cottage cheese / put the lid on the peanut butter jar / sandwiches made of cucumber, stop eating the food! (As Ever p 35). Mixing the mythic, impersonal past into a very personal now, Kyger remains true to her orchestration of these voices and brings us their wisdom and joy.
Sometime shortly after Kyger writes her lovely poem to Ganesha, she moves to Bolinas. It is at this point that her myths stop leading her poems. Instead, they erupt in the fragments of her notebook or are assimilated into objects:
wood
sweep
ocean
music
It’s getting figured out
shells
wood
notes
Kyger is not a naïve empiricist who is confusing the word with the object. She is speaking of the relationship of words with the unexpected or paradoxical. The relationship can also be as clear as the word shell is to ocean. This poem’s koanic quality above all offers us a way of seeing the relationship of the various objects that arise from her unconscious and subconscious to each other. It is the honesty of her approach that is remarkable.
Some people are natural novelists. They exaggerate, twist, distort, and lie to bring some greater pleasure—and we hope some greater truth—to an audience. Kyger is a truth teller. Her instinct for the unvarnished truth as she sees it is laid out for all to see in Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals 1960-1964. Too often followers of the beats with whom she traveled - Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky - have gathered their material into counterculture hagiographies. Kyger, the only member of the group that was writing as they traveled, gives us brilliant observation, day in and day out, of the challenges inherent in these strong personalities trying to get along. Above she seeks the human and humane, even when it might show her in a less than perfect light.
Caught unprepared for a storm on Descheo Island in 1971, Kyger and her Caribbean cheechakos lose such precious items as Peter’s thesis, Margot’s hiking boot and Joanne’s cigarettes to the “30 feet dark silver monsters (As Ever 126)” of a serious tropical storm that inundate their campsite on the beach. Kyger’s impression as written in this poetic sequence is she won’t survive the island. She does but that’s the way she feels. It goes in the journal and on to the poem.
Though Kyger continued to travel, teach, to give readings and make an occasional trip to Mexico, her sense of Bolinas as her place and a love of the fine details of daily life become more and more intertwined. I want a smaller thing in mind / Like a good dinner / I’m tired of these big things happening / They happen to me all the time (As Ever p 134).
Of course Kyger’s Bolinas is anything but small. Through her garden, the Bolinas ecosystem, her relationship to people, friends or otherwise, her relationship to herself and religious / mythical / philosophical subjects such as the origin myths of her local Miwok Native Americans, Buddhism, Christianity or Descartes, Kyger informs us with day by daybook poetry that doesn’t declares where it is starting so much as it begins where it begins:
And I know this is my focus to meander
for days around the calendulas
now happily reseeded next to their roots
(As Ever p 194)
Of course Kyger’s poetic meanderings here are bhikkus, going where their spiritual longings take them. March 7, Wednesday Palenque 1985, one of two pieces from her collection Phenomenological in As Ever, revels in the presence of an ‘iridescent blue butterfly’ and fourteen toucans that are the joyful natural foreground that includes a river running below the ruins. Her ambivalence to human presence is noted when the quiet of the natural surroundings is broken by the excited North Americans who say, “What’s the name of this place?” sharing with us their joy and ignorance, and the noisy, aggressive Germans we find in the poem March 8, Thursday, also from Phenomenological. Here the human ruins are a backdrop most of all for “friend butterfly / is back in brown and red and yellow / the most beautiful guard / of this temple (As Ever, p 233).
Kyger is disturbed by nature’s lack of voice in the counting rooms of capitalism. Indeed, there is an implicit commitment to positive environment and political change that grows as politics in the United States goes from bad to worse. But as she grows older her sense of the present, the immediacy that is so omnipresent in her word is tempered by the loss of her friends, important figures in her life like Larry Eigner, Chogyam Trumpa. The wonderful piece on her once-close friend Richard Brautigan doesn’t need a title and doesn’t have one but for her journal date October 25. This remarkable elegy never tells us Brautigan dies, or that his life went off the tracks. Instead Kyger tells the reader she has finished reading a biography of Somerset Maugham, who dies at 92 “—terrified, lonely, crazy, no religion” (p 234) to suggest this in Brautigan.
A friend she’s giving a ride to, Charles Reeves, says “I think a tragedy has occurred” as Kyger and Reeves drive down a street called Terrace. As they pass Richard Brautigan’s house they see a police car in front of it. Joanne ends the poem: “Well he’s gone / away, maybe / a robbery . . . “. Maugham then suffers terrible before he dies, providing an intimation of tragedy that is not recognized in the poem. The only way a reader would know what happened to Brautigan is if they knew that October 25th was the day his body was found.
There is such great depth in all of Kyger’s elegies, much the same as the Reader experiences in October 25th. For Kyger, knowledge is never a blunt instrument.
Two formidable influences run through the course of Kyger’s work. The first is that of Charles Olson’s Projective Verse. One can feel how deeply Kyger has absorbed this critical document of English-language poetics in the United States in the 20th Century. Several important points came to mind when I reread this essay for this piece. Olson enjoins poets to always remember that energy is moved by the poet from the poem to the reader. This is the critical first step that Kyger has absorbed. Secondly, Kyger understands that the field of composition is a piece of paper, and the age we live in allows us to physically arrange a poem according to the demands of “the HEAD by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE (Olson 2) and “the HEART by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” Kyger has taken these words of Olson to heart:
It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. If he sprawl, he shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. But if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man.
(Olson 4)
This passage is a cornerstone of Kyger’s poetics. Her poetry life has been dedicated to understanding the human relationship to nature and creating work larger than the oversized egos of human beings. But none of this in any way obscures her dedication to creating mythology poems, such as Jakata Tales, Adonis is Older than Jesus, or From the Life of Naropa, which are of which nod in the direction of one of her mentors, Robert Duncan, who spent most of his poetic life exploring these rich mythological grounds.
Ron Silliman wrote the poet and critic Linda Russo in 1998 that Kyger is “one of our hidden treasures -- the poet who really links the Beats, the Spicer Circle, the Bolinas poets, the NY School and the language poets, and the only poet who can be said to do all of the above.” High praise indeed. But aside from being a nexus of various schools, Kyger is above all a poet to be praised, who has followed her path so as to open a field of understanding for her readers, a field that is both on the page and physical present as the dry, yellow grasses of the Marin County hillside that children in my time slid down on cardboard.
This discussion of Kyger’s work began with her hair and sailed on to the sea that Kyger plied in her Odyssey as both Odysseus and Penelope. We find the world of water and mythology meet in her poem Ocean Parkway Gazing. In this poem, Kyger sits near the ocean listen to the waves and writing the first section of this poem. The writing here is of the natural in precise detail that sings of its presence. The second part tells us how this scene came to be and with what the journey will be mapped.
The voice describes the scene
looks up for reference
listens to two
songs sparrows carry out
their call
And response as the hissy light
waves roll over changing continuum.
The minutes go by the sea
The sea closes in
Up to the edge
of mythology.
Water and Mythology: two of Kyger’s abiding interests. No doubt she went home and washed her hair after writing this.
To balance this rather serious discussion, I leave you with the levity of the poem Phillip Whalen’s Hat. Somewhere I read that some people haven’t taken her seriously because of her comedic talents. Comments like this make me want to. . . well, when I hear something like this, I lose my sense of humor.
I woke up about 2:30 this morning and thought about Philip's
hat.
It is bright lemon yellow, with a little brim
all the way around, and a lime green hat band, printed
with tropical plants.
It sits on top
of his shaved head. It upstages every thing & every body.
He bought it at Walgreen's himself.
I mean it fortunately wasn't a gift from an admirer.
Otherwise he is dressed in soft blues. And in his hands
a long wooden string of Buddhist Rosary beads, which he keeps
moving. I ask him which mantra he is doing - but he tells me
in Zen, you don't have to bother with any of that.
You can just play with the beads.
If you would like to read more about Joanne Kyger, head over to the following site put together by the wonderful Linda Russo. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/...
Bibliography
e-mail to Linda Russo by Ron Silliman
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/...
Kyger, Joanne, As Ever. Penguin Books, New York, New York. 2002
Kyger, Joanne Phil Whalen’s Hat from Just Space: poems, 1979-1989 (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991) http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/philip...
Olson, Charles, Projective Verse http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 18, 2016
i don't believe in any
of your gods or powers
it's all bullshit.
i don't even believe
in my powers or gods.
Her dying words were
keep the house clean.
of your gods or powers
it's all bullshit.
i don't even believe
in my powers or gods.
Her dying words were
keep the house clean.
August 2, 2007
Saw this going for cheap at Borders and decided to give it a crack. I wasn't disappointed. I guess it's because it's very Zen, Beat-like, and... soulful. I couldn't put it down. I'm glad to have discovered this poet.
Read
June 11, 2025"Have I lost all values I wonder/ the world is slippery to hold on to/ When you begin to deny it./ Outside outside are the crickets and frogs in the rice fields/ Large black butterflies like birds" (15)
"Memory has no direction,/ a soft weeping like rain drumming dry soil" (38)
"I don't know which direction./ She whispers/ In his ear. And he listens like one big eye...it is taking its time/ clear and fragile in the park, like an idea of his/ and above it/ like a dark red bruise, the house" (47)
"I was always asking for the specific thing that wasn't mine. I wanted a haven that wasn't my own, and the others knew. You find out when they take you along, all the ill-made parts that make you so scared" (66)
"I CONTEMPLATE THE REFORMATION OF MY OWN OPINIONS AND WILL BASE THEM ON A FOUNDATION WHOLLY MY OWN. It is impossible to trust any one else. WALKING ALONE IN THE DARK I RESOLVE TO PROCEED SLOWLY...EXCESS IS USUALLY VISCIOUS and NOTHING ON EARTH IS WHOLLY SUPERIOR TO CHANGE" (71)
"her own death, which is her own/ eternal youth, her own love of herself" (75)
"every exaggeration/ the movement of grass behind the tree/ I thought was you/ for a moment spacing out" (82)
"perfect thought/ the relationship of everything/ to everything/ If you don't want it/ for yourself/ don't give it to anybody else" (91)
"I am walking up the path/ I come home and wash my hair/ I am bereft/ I dissolve quickly/ I am everybody" (101)
"The 'psyche' is not/ a personal but a world existence./ The kernel of all jealousy/ is lack of love" (114)
"I am still alive/ smelling of the ocean" (128)
"Often I try so hard with stimulants/ which only graze the surface/ like I wish to become surface/ Whereas the real state is called golden/ where things are exactly what they are" (132)
"Compassion flows forth like the well of surrender" (142)
"We have met the enemy and they are ours./ I love you all,/ Joanne" (142)
"I have large dreams of beautiful patterns./ Clouds over Indiana/ And we are under them" (143)
"But then again what do I know/ of my heart but that it is tight/ and wishes to burst/ past the walls of my chest/ I am depressed, darling/ the power of belief/ is from me" (149)
"What is this self/ I think I will lose if I leave what I know" ( 160)
"I'm going to be a poet, I can put it together too./ Life is beset by small accidents" (168)
"Is this heaven or hell or summer camp" (204)
"God makes an impenetrable screen/ of pure sky, pulsating/ undulating, casual" (273)
" 'Poetry is about continuing Poetry'. Look look/ look quickly" (283)
"No one will notice you/ The gods won't drag you off / the earth for their own/ Entertainment. You are camoflauged/ with simplicity" (297)
"The less you know/ the better/ because 'ideas' can fuck you up" (300)
"through the conviction of the poet/ combining/ these strands into a useful cord,/ a thread/ to throw into the dream and see it/ come up clear/ as a picture in the evening" (303)
"Memory has no direction,/ a soft weeping like rain drumming dry soil" (38)
"I don't know which direction./ She whispers/ In his ear. And he listens like one big eye...it is taking its time/ clear and fragile in the park, like an idea of his/ and above it/ like a dark red bruise, the house" (47)
"I was always asking for the specific thing that wasn't mine. I wanted a haven that wasn't my own, and the others knew. You find out when they take you along, all the ill-made parts that make you so scared" (66)
"I CONTEMPLATE THE REFORMATION OF MY OWN OPINIONS AND WILL BASE THEM ON A FOUNDATION WHOLLY MY OWN. It is impossible to trust any one else. WALKING ALONE IN THE DARK I RESOLVE TO PROCEED SLOWLY...EXCESS IS USUALLY VISCIOUS and NOTHING ON EARTH IS WHOLLY SUPERIOR TO CHANGE" (71)
"her own death, which is her own/ eternal youth, her own love of herself" (75)
"every exaggeration/ the movement of grass behind the tree/ I thought was you/ for a moment spacing out" (82)
"perfect thought/ the relationship of everything/ to everything/ If you don't want it/ for yourself/ don't give it to anybody else" (91)
"I am walking up the path/ I come home and wash my hair/ I am bereft/ I dissolve quickly/ I am everybody" (101)
"The 'psyche' is not/ a personal but a world existence./ The kernel of all jealousy/ is lack of love" (114)
"I am still alive/ smelling of the ocean" (128)
"Often I try so hard with stimulants/ which only graze the surface/ like I wish to become surface/ Whereas the real state is called golden/ where things are exactly what they are" (132)
"Compassion flows forth like the well of surrender" (142)
"We have met the enemy and they are ours./ I love you all,/ Joanne" (142)
"I have large dreams of beautiful patterns./ Clouds over Indiana/ And we are under them" (143)
"But then again what do I know/ of my heart but that it is tight/ and wishes to burst/ past the walls of my chest/ I am depressed, darling/ the power of belief/ is from me" (149)
"What is this self/ I think I will lose if I leave what I know" ( 160)
"I'm going to be a poet, I can put it together too./ Life is beset by small accidents" (168)
"Is this heaven or hell or summer camp" (204)
"God makes an impenetrable screen/ of pure sky, pulsating/ undulating, casual" (273)
" 'Poetry is about continuing Poetry'. Look look/ look quickly" (283)
"No one will notice you/ The gods won't drag you off / the earth for their own/ Entertainment. You are camoflauged/ with simplicity" (297)
"The less you know/ the better/ because 'ideas' can fuck you up" (300)
"through the conviction of the poet/ combining/ these strands into a useful cord,/ a thread/ to throw into the dream and see it/ come up clear/ as a picture in the evening" (303)
June 25, 2018
9 years later, second time thru. Found an old bookmark, an Amtrak ticket from Chicago to Indianapolis from the first time I read it. I remember a few poems from here and there, mostly about mice and deer. Feeling called to write daily poems again. We’ll see. Joanne is a poet that remains in my subconscious, the calm waters of my dreams, the space between the inhale and exhale, the wisp of smoke that rises when the candle burns out.
May 10, 2019
I think Kyger has some really strong, insightful moments. I think Kyger also has some, honestly, boring selected pieces in here that served more as snippets of autobiography than they do snippets of poetry. One poem stood out particularly as reading incredibly racist against Mexicans? Strange collection.
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