Joanne Kyger's Publicly Intimate There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera

Edited by Cedar Sigo, Joanne Kyger's There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera (Wave Books, 2017) is the subject of a piece at Boston Review. "Through Sigo’s inspired curating, There You Are gets at two of poetry’s most pressing questions: how to ground poems in the lived life, and how to make 'the intimate public,'" writes Cassandra Cleghorn. More:

For Kyger, the banal record of her morning’s rituals of procrastination opens into nothing less than a theory of art: our appetites, addictions, and desires shape what we put out, as well as what we take in, and yet these processes of creative consumption and production threaten our ability to inhabit the present, fragile moment. A poem is residue or after-effect, as well as aspiration. Kyger always included date and time at the start of her journal entries, but beyond that she had no rules except to write absolutely for herself and without judgment, if also with considerable discernment. On the often spare pages of her journal, Kyger refined the practice of “the editing that goes on in the ear.” A mere five lines may suffice for the day’s work, but those lines must bear witness to the moment—and motive—of their making. “If you can’t read your own writing back,” she tells an interviewer, “it’s time to find out what or how you want to write things.”

Kyger numbered among her closest friends those who read at Rexroth’s famous Six Gallery reading on Fillmore Street in 1955—including Allen Ginsburg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen—but she steadfastly resisted affiliation with either the San Francisco Renaissance or the Beat movement. When pressed by literary critic Linda Russo about her connection to the Beats especially, Kyger said, “My practice of writing was a lot stricter, coming from the energy of [Jack] Spicer, and someone like Robert Duncan who was opposed to the tendency . . . to let it all dribble out.” While Frank O’Hara was in New York writing his “I-do-this, I-do-that” poems, Kyger was on the opposite coast, sitting zazen, obsessively rereading Olson’s “Projective Verse,” practicing “how to put words on the page, determining . . . where to do your own internal editing,” and sampling all manner of psychotropic substances. “Peyote has its own truth. It’s hard to misuse it,” she tells one interviewer, helpfully. She read and admired Lorine Niedecker’s work in Origin, Cid Corman’s magazine, where Kyger’s own work would later be published. With respect to aesthetic philosophy and literary style, There You Are situates Kyger at the disciplined edge of the experimental vanguard.

The full piece at Boston Review.