Garrett Caples Remembers Joanne Kyger

Like many of you, we're still saddened by the loss of Joanne Kyger, who died last week at the age of 82. At the City Lights blog, Garrett Caples, who served as the editor for Kyger's 2015 volume On Time: Poems 2005-2014, writes about his experience working with her and knowing her humor and many kindnesses.

I’d known Joanne, not well, for about a decade when I first received a call from her wondering if City Lights would be interested in a book of her poems. And how! I thought, and it was not difficult to sell the press on the idea. I admit I was intimidated at the prospect of being her editor, but I needn’t have been. It was easy, because she knew what she wanted, and merely required me as an occasional sounding board. (J: “Should I cut this?” G: “No!” was our most frequent exchange; I think I asked her to add one poem I knew of that she hadn’t included in the initial MS.) A couple trips to Bolinas, a couple glasses of wine, and we were done. The clarity of purpose she brought to the project was characteristic, perhaps necessary for a woman of the Beat Generation. Recognition was not as easily forthcoming as it was for some of her male colleagues and she’d had to endure in order for her reputation to catch up to her achievements.

Her poetic practice was fascinating to me, a process of daily writing and retrospective culling, resulting in a MS of sequentially dated poems. When the book was published, she tweaked me, just a little, for not including a table of contents, and I admit it hadn’t occurred to me because the flow of the book seemed so organic and integral to itself. I was struck during our discussions around the book by her remark that she was deeply influenced by Frank O’Hara, who provided an antidote to her early lessons at the feet of Robert Duncan. The weight of erudition Duncan brought to his poems, she said, was impossible to emulate, and O’Hara offered a welcome relief in his attention to the quotidian details of experience. In her own poetry we’re afforded access to a larger, metaphysical realm of inquiry through her focus on the minute particulars of daily life.

Head to City Lights to read the rest.