The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

Carolyn Kizer and the Chain of Women

Carolyn Kizer and the Chain of Women It is the mark of a certain point in a young writer’s development —arguably the onset of true literary maturity—when she looks up from the eclectic, sprawling collection of classic and contemporary inBuences she has been ostensibly pulling together for herself for many years, takes a long breath, and is struck by the depth of her indebtedness to a much smaller group of writers. Such a revelation happened to me recently regarding Carolyn Kizer. Since Kizer is approaching her seventyAfth birthday and ready for some long-deserved appreciation, this essay pays tribute to her unique role in American women’s poetry. After all, where would I, as a woman poet who feels a close connection to her foremothers in the art, be—and where would so many of us be—without the passionate Agure of Carolyn Kizer to link us with our past as women poets? Kizer might not place herself among the writers she so unforgettably dubbed, in “Pro Femina,” “the toasts-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen.” But she has earned a unique place in my personal canon just because of her sometimes ambivalent but always powerful relationship with such writers. Her poems meet me in the twenty-Arst century while simultaneously linking me back through a long tradition of emotionally astute, poetically exacting , passionate women poets that includes Phillis Wheatley, Frances Osgood, Emily Dickinson, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anna Hampstead Branch, Emma Lazarus, Jay McPherson, Louise Bogan, Julia Randall, and 77 Originally appeared in Poetry Flash (April 2001). Reprinted in Perspectives on Carolyn Kizer, ed. Annie Finch, Joanna Keller, and Candace McClelland (CavanKerry, 2001). Leonie Adams. Though the exquisitely crafted and classically controlled work of such poets is now beginning to earn a welldeserved reconsideration, it is still a legacy fraught with ambivalence for Kizer, as for most women poets. Responsibility to these poets’ concerns has remained a crucial element of Kizer’s aesthetic at the same time that awareness of their limitations has spurred her to refute and surpass them. This powerful tradition of women poets built successful careers writing formal, accessible poems about spiritual and political as well as domestic and emotional themes. I call their techniques “sentimentist” (a coinage for which I am indebted to Kizer herself) to distinguish them from the more familiar, very different techniques of the Romantic poets. Independently of Romanticism and Modernism, the sentimentists developed and explored their own poetic traditions and techniques: they wrote of a shared, accessible world from an often diffused, uncentered point of view, and they tended to metaphorize the self, instead of nature or a loved one, in their lyrics. As the decades went on and women’s positions improved, early twentieth-century sentimentists adapted many of their precedessors’ techniques to more powerful and independent attitudes and themes. But at midcentury the chain broke. The poems of Bishop and Moore preserved some aspects of the sentimentist tradition into the 1970s, in a form so altered by the complex ironic stances of Modernism that in their hands the tradition lost much of its original character. Plath and Sexton, both of whom guiltily admired the sentimentist women poets in their youth, died too young ever to admit it. Feminist poets who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s distanced themselves from the poetesses because of their subject matter, not to mention their form. Finally, in the postmodern climate of the ’80s and ’90s, the hermetic tradition of Stein and H. D. pushed the sentimentists even further distant on the basis of their accessibility, while the intimate connections between Dickinson and the central thread of women’s poetry continued to be ignored. In the Ave decades following New Criticism the classic tradition of women’s poetry had been torn apart. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain in their essay “Forward into the Past,” the price of poetic success for any woman after midcentury has been to despise virtually all pre-twentieth-century poetry by 78 women, ignoring the intriguing afAnities between Dickinson, not to mention H. D. and Stein, and the sentimentists. Yet, in such a climate of uncompromising obliviousness to the serious accomplishments of the vast bulk of women poets, Carolyn Kizer has consistently acknowledged and drawn on the legacy of the women poets who came before her. Kizer’s allusions to her foremothers evoke, as often as not, anger, embarrassment, and pain. Nonetheless, she has kept this irreplaceable inheritance alive...