Two Poets by the Lake: James Wright and Carolyn Kizer

Our bodies, too, our moulted bodies, spreadtheir loins and wings below, to free the soul.

— “A Love Poem with Mallards and Garlands,” 299

This is how pudgy poet James Wright, an awkward, shy man described a tryst with his slender and super-sexy poet-friend Carolyn Kizer at Lake Washington in Seattle in the mid-1950s. In “A Love Poem with Mallards and Garlands,” Wright imagined their loving coupling at the “hinge of the green lake,” with dusk “fallen softly away” and “ripples of water” that “bounce to moss and rock” (298). With melancholy overtones of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Wright romanticizes, compares Kizer and himself to his beloved birds, symbols of the soul, who die orgasmically, only to rise up and “Heave at the earth to find the sun again” (300). Wright thought his poem “linguistically the boldest thing I’ve ever tried to write, whether it comes off or not” and intended to give it “a prominent place” in his 1959 second book, Saint Judas (letter to Carolyn Kizer, February 1958). In the end, he didn’t include it “in that debacle St. J. . . . precisely because it was better than anything in that morbid and suicidal collection,” deciding to make it the “cornerstone” of his next book (letter to Carolyn Kizer, August 8–9, 1960). But “A Love Poem with Mallards and Garlands” was never collected because it was far too formal for his fluid, ground-breaking The Branch Will Not Break (1963).

“I just wrote . . . a poem about Jim,” Kizer wrote their mutual friend Isabella Gardner, then married in Minneapolis to Allen Tate: “It’s really an answer to a poem he had in the Quarterly Review a couple of years ago, called ‘Love Song with Mallards and Garlands.’ Sometimes I think there are two ways to write a poem based on an actual experience: 1) make it a romantic lie, or 2) distort it into significant truth. Jim did the first. I did the second. Mine, of course, should be the better poem. (It isn’t)” (Kizer, letter to Isabella Gardner, September 21, 1960). In her contrapuntal “Two Poets by the Lake,” Kizer, sarcastic where Wright was sentimental, placed the episode at a parking lot with “aggressive gulls” near murky, polluted “Lake Stinko” as Lake Washington was known then, where, “Pale with cold, and the forcing of emotion / You shook off chrome, and crumbs, the century, / And bade me enter your chill pastoral.” In Kizer’s biting version of their meeting there was no mating, for she “could not / would not, mirror you” prompting “‘It’s no use, Tom. Let’s go on home’ ” (138–39). Kizer had sent a draft version to Wright, who was touched “deeply” by it and thought it “magnificent” (letter to Carolyn Kizer, August 8–9, 1960). According to Kizer, Wright not only wanted to have sex with her, but even asked her to marry him, which she refused. As Kizer told it, “He was very crestfallen, pulled out the pity-card and said, ‘I’m just a plain poet. Who would marry me?,’ ” to which she answered, “Well, that’s the whole thing. You are a great poet. You’ll wind up marrying someone really special and wonderful” (Rigsbee).

Jonathan Blunk, author of the long-awaited, authorized biography James Wright: A Life in Poetry (2017) mentions a number of Wright’s muses, but Kizer is not among them. There are as many ways to write a literary biography as ways to paint a portrait, from realistic to conceptual, from a focus on your subject to one on surroundings, from a concentration on the life to one on the work, and Blunk has chosen the latter: “My hope has always been to turn attention back to the poems, which include some of the most influential and enduring lyrics of the past century. Wright’s life, by turns despairing and inspiring, is always fascinating. But as he would remind us, it is finally...