The Kathleen Fraser
"From as early in my life as I can remember, I resisted others’ categories and imperatives, perhaps because there were so many of them. I didn’t like being identified too readily or absolutely, nor did I wish to represent anything that could be described ahead of time.”
Staying true to that dictum, from her 1993 essay “Faulty Copying,” was at the core of Kathleen Fraser’s writing, a five‐decade practice committed to unveiling new processes and poetic registers.
Born in Oklahoma, Kathleen Fraser (1935 - 2919) grew up in a Calvinist family and lived in Tulsa, then in small‐town Colorado, and finally in Southern California, where she attended Occidental College in Los Angeles. Moving to New York in the late 1950s, she worked for Mademoiselle and took poetry workshops with Stanley Kunitz and Kenneth Koch. Early influences included Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton. She learned, as she said, how to write a New Yorker poem. Three of her early poems were published there.
She also met members of the New York School of poetry—a group of poets whose work combined Surrealism, irony, pop culture, and high art. Frank O’Hara and Barbara Guest were especially important influences. Her stature as a poet continued to rise through the 1960s and 1970s, and she published several chapbooks (the first two with Kayak Books) and then two full‐length collections with Harper & Row. After teaching posts at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Reed College, Fraser arrived at San Francisco State University in 1972, where she would be a professor of creative writing for twenty years, as well as director of SFSU’s Poetry Center and founder of the American Poetry Archives.
Despite recognition from some of the most established literary publishers in the country, Fraser had already begun moving past the modes of writing that brought her early attention. She was eager to leave behind the polished and witty lines of the New York School and embrace, as she describes, “a listening attitude, an attending to unconscious connections, a backing off of the performing ego to allow the mysteries and mind of language to come forward and resonate more fully.” She read deeply the work of George Oppen, Jack Spicer, Lorine Niedecker, and H.D. She also began to read and introduce students to other female modernist poets—including Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Dorothy Richardson—who had been omitted from the male‐dominated canon.
Starting in the late 1970s, the shape and sound of Fraser’s poems began to change, as she discovered her own “poetics focused on syntax and unease.” She experimented with fragment, found materials, and the white space of the page. Some of these strategies grew out of feminist thought about the role of silence and erasure in language use for women. In addition to her extensive work as a poet and teacher, Fraser was the founding editor of the germinal feminist poetics journal HOW(ever), which focused on innovative writing by women poets, both past and contemporary. The print journal, which ran from 1983 to 1991, was edited in collaboration with Beverly Dahlen, Frances Jaffer, and, later, Susan Gevirtz. In 1999, an online version, How2, emerged to resume and archive the original vision.
Throughout over a dozen books, Fraser continued to rigorously experiment with language, exploring uncertainty, instability, dislocation, personal and cultural loss, spaciousness, and investigation itself. She became interested in the way error might create tension and frisson, as evidenced in her poem “boundayr,” in which a typo makes a new word and becomes the perfect title for a complex poem about color and perception. Starting in the early 1980s, Fraser began considering the idea of history in her work, partially as a result of her stays in Italy and her appreciation of Etruscan sites and Giotto’s paintings. In her late work, she went further into the visual and material quality of language, created her own collages, and undertook ambitious collaborations with contemporary artists.
A restless visionary who long advocated for error and improvisation, Kathleen Fraser stands as a unique and indefinable figure in the landscape of post‐war American poetry. Throughout her career, she relentlessly sought out “the tentative region of the untried,” as predicted by the title of her first collection, Change of Address. Kathleen Fraser passed away on February 5, 2019.
—Co-written by Suzanne Wise, Staff Writer at Poets House, and Stephen Motika, Publisher of Nightboat Books.
Kayak Books and the journal Kayak were founded by George Hitchcock (June 2, 1914–August 27, 2010) from his home in San Francisco. Kayak Books released over 70 books between 1966 and 1978, with titles by poets like Robert Bly, Raymond Carver, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, James Tate, Nancy Willard, and Jay Wright. Hitchcock gave a start to many new authors: Kathleen Fraser published her first two books with Kayak Books (Change of Address was her very first), as did Charles Simic. Kayak magazine, which the New York Times called “one of the most distinctive, eagerly read literary journals of its time,” had an even longer run, spanning 20 years (1964–84) across 64 issues and publishing poets such as Margaret Atwood, Wendell Berry, Colette Inez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, and Louis Simpson.
Hitchcock’s enterprise was founded upon his self‐ascribed interest in “surrealist, imagist and political poems.” Philip Levine noted a broader appeal—a “potent and unified vision of the America of the sixties.” In addition to being a poet, fiction writer, playwright, actor, and artist, Hitchcock spent formative years as a labor organizer and reporter. His defiant, nationally broadcast testimony before the House Un‐American Activities Committee in 1957 only added to his reputation as a rebel against the status quo. He critiqued standard-bearers like poet Robert Lowell and the Hudson Review, and, in the pages of his magazine, he took the opportunity to speak out “against the barbarous and asinine war in Vietnam.”
Hitchcock not only edited the magazine issues and books, he also art directed—creating a distinctive look that married contemporary poetry with vintage letterpress printing. “Kayak visually reflected the freewheeling spirit of its time with whimsical or surreal graphic accompaniment,” noted poet Robert McDowell. Many of the books employed reproductions of 19th-century engravings collaged in ironic juxtaposition to the poems, as well as surrealist drawings by contemporary illustrators. He also featured visual and collage poetry, such as the work of Raymond DiPalma and Margaret Fabrizio.
Part of the 
This recording features Kathleen Fraser giving a poetry reading at the 
