In over 30 books of poetry and prose, Joanne Kyger (1934–2017) explored the particularities of place, time, and voice in “a lifelong commitment to poetry as a mode of presence in and awareness of the phenomenal world,” as Linda Russo writes. As a young poet of the late 1950s and 60s, Kyger was quickly recognized as an important new voice of the San Francisco Renaissance, and she would travel in circles of prominent poets associated with the Beat movement, the New York School, and Black Mountain College. She also became a central figure in the artistic and literary community of Bolinas, California, where she moved in 1969 and lived the rest of her life. Despite Kyger’s affiliations with these movements and communities, “she remains in a category of her own design and making,” Anne Waldman observes. Her genre-defying work brings together elements of the journal or daybook, travelogue, spiritual meditation, philosophical inquiry, and political-minded contemplations of ecology, history, and myth.
Born in Vallejo, California, in 1934, Kyger is often described as a poet of both place and travel, and her early life was marked by various journeys across the U.S. and beyond. Her father’s naval career took the family to China, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, before they settled in Santa Barbara, California, when Kyger was 14. The family remained there for the next eight years, during which time Kyger attended the University of California at Santa Barbara as an undergraduate, studying literature and philosophy.
Kyger’s immersion in the significant countercultural literary scenes of the postwar era began when she moved to San Francisco in 1957. This was the year that City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti went to trial to defend himself against obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, as well as the year Black Mountain College closed its doors, sending a bevy of young writers and artists to the Bay Area, where Kyger would make their acquaintance. She participated in the legendary Sunday poetry meetings held by Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and Spicer published her work in his magazine J.
By 1960, Kyger’s path as a poet would range farther afield when she moved to Kyoto to live with Gary Snyder, whom she married. Together, they travelled around Asia, journeying through India with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. She wrote about the experience in Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals, 1960-1964 (originally published by Tombouctou Books in 1981 and more recently reissued under its subtitle by Nightboat Books in 2016), and frequently spoke of its importance to her path as a poet and person. During this period, she also continued studies in Buddhism and wrote poems that would be gathered into her first poetry collection.
Returning to the U.S. in 1964, Kyger commenced a chapter of rapid change in her literary life. The following year, she divorced Snyder; published her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, with Donald Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation; and participated in the famous Berkeley Poetry Conference, which included readings and lectures by Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and other luminaries. More travels ensued—to Europe and New York City, followed by a return to northern California, ending in Bolinas in 1969. The coastal town became a destination for writers and artists—some temporary visitors, some neighbors over many years—including Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Bill Berkson, Robert Creeley, Tom Clark, John Thorpe, Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins.
Kyger continued to publish collections of poetry and prose with small presses, including Places To Go (Black Sparrow, 1970), and two books from Arif Press, Desecheo Notebook (1971) and Trip Out & Fall Back (1974). Other volumes include Just Space: Poems, 1979–1989 (Black Sparrow, 1991); Going On: Selected Poems 1958–1980, winner of the National Poetry Series (Dutton, 1983); On Time: Poems 2005–2014 (City Lights, 2015); As Ever: Selected Poems (Penguin, 2002); and About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation,
2007), which won the Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. She also taught at the New College of California, Mills College, and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Joanne Kyger has been influential across generations, particularly to women poets who have sought alternative examples to the male-dominated lineage of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats. Poets engaged in ecopoetics have also found inspiration in Kyger’s deft considerations of nature and human presence within it. She died in March of 2017 and is survived by her husband, the artist and author Donald Guravich.
Co-written by Suzanne Wise, Staff Writer at Poets House, and Jessica Fletcher, a Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellow, as part of a joint program with the CUNY Graduate Center.