Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger (Clemson University Press: Beat Studies)

Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger provides a much-needed re-evaluation of the work of Joanne Kyger, a remarkably productive poet associated with transformative literary movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Kyger uses time and place to anchor her writing in the present moment (as reflected in the title of her collected poems, About Now), and this collection employs a similar approach to present Kyger to readers who may be less familiar with her work. The essays take readers from her stay in Japan in the 1960s to her return to California and her life in Bolinas from the 1970s on, as well as her travels to places such as Desecheo Island and Mexico. The essays explore Kyger’s poetics through close readings of her poems and journals, as well as through her approach to issues which concerned her throughout her life; these issues include ecology, reinhabitation, the politics of NAFTA, and the War on Terror. Contributors also investigate her relation to feminism, Buddhism, and ecopoetics. Kyger’s connections to various movements in American literature are also emphasized, as well as ways in which she is part of but extends and improvises on the Beat Movement. Cover Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Joanne Kyger, A Poet in Place and Time (Jane Falk and Mary Paniccia Carden) 2 Artists of a Floating World: Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg’s Rainy Day Sea of Japan (Mark Gonnerman) 3 Real and Mythopoetic Geographies: Reading Joanne Kyger’s “fragmented. ie several valleys.” in Kyoto (Linda Russo) 4 Mythic Space and Joanne Kyger’s Poetics of Integration (Mary Paniccia Carden) 5 “It wasn’t going to go anywhere”: Joanne Kyger’s Poetics of the Ordinary (Sara Laws) 6 Joanne Kyger’s Desecheo Notebook and the Beat Veneration (Amy L. Friedman) 7 “See the truly enlightened other”: Kyger, Buddhism, and Drugs (Timothy Gray) 8 Again as Ecodharma: The Generosity of Joanne Kyger’s Ecopoetics (Jonathan Skinner) 9 “these words about words / beyond words”: Reading Joanne Kyger's "For the Pittosporum Tenuifolium Outside the Studio Window" (Stephen Ratcliffe) 10 Joanne Kyger at Naropa University (Andrew Schelling) 11 Poet in Time of Crisis: The Political Joanne Kyger (Jane Falk) 12 Alice Notley on Joanne Kyger: “Utterly Herself” (An Interview by Jane Falk) Afterword. Joanne Kyger: Then and Now (John Whalen-Bridge) Notes Notes on Contributors Index