Wading through anthologies of writing by women in search of the extraordinary, we were astonished by Carolyn Kizer’s Pro Femina, which stood out from the anthology standards like a classical temple to Artemis inexplicably planted in a subsection of McMansions. It is a still thrilling “Marseillaise” of first wave feminism. We spoke to Marian Janssen, who has written the first biography of this great and marginalized poet.
96 You are the author of Not At All What One is Used To (2010) the definitive biography of the poet Isabella Gardner, and now you are now seeking a publisher for your completed biography of Carolyn Kizer. Could you tell us who Kizer was and what it was about her that led you to spend a decade writing about her?
MJ I wrote my Isabella Gardner biography while I was Director of my Dutch university’s International Office. After finishing that book, I again concentrated fully on my paid job. One day I received a fan mail from a certain Ashley Bullitt. She added that she knew most of the poets I had written about, as her mother was Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer. I had spent an afternoon interviewing Kizer for my Gardner biography, drinking white wine in the garden of her Sonoma house. I had been bowled over and intimidated by her intelligence as well as her towering physical presence. Beneath her sometimes snippy answers lurked the question: why is this Dutch woman writing about Gardner, but not about me? Ashley Bullitt’s mail lured me into thinking about writing an article or two about Kizer during my spare time. I started researching and was hooked, not only by her poetry, but also by her life.
“I wish my goddamned life would quit trying to resemble a rather large, lousy novel,” she wrote her former lover, the poet Hayden Carruth in 1962, after having been cut up for cancer, after having lost both a baby and a violent French lover, and, perhaps most painfully for her, after having a poem about this lover rejected. Kizer’s life does indeed resemble a soap opera and is emblematic of the struggles of a twentieth century woman far more intelligent than most men. Who could resist writing the life of such a woman? Not me. So, after I had obtained a contract from the (Kizer-) Woodbridge Estate Revocable Trust giving me freedom to research and quote, I exchanged my job as Director of the International Office for one as a biographer at its Faculty of Arts.
Kizer was a powerbroker in the literary world as founder-editor of the influential journal Poetry Northwest, as the first Director of the NEA’s Literary Program, and as winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Yin in 1985. The New Yorker had published her when she was only nineteen–at the time the youngest poet ever to appear there. Even earlier, Ladies’ Home Journal had printed one of her poems; later she was a regular contributor to such prestigious magazines as Botthege Oscure, The Kenyon Review, New Letters, Poetry Magazine, The Prairie Schooner, et cetera. Kizer also regularly reviewed for The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post Book World. Proto-feminist poet, essayist, translator, and always politically engaged, she resigned as Chancellor from the American Academy of Poets in 1999 because this white old boys club refused to elect Lucille Clifton.
Contradictions abound. Initially admired as a figurehead of feminism, it was not long before Kizer was reviled by second wave feminists in part because she loathed theorists: “I think one must come to the conclusion that people who teach Women’s Studies don’t read poetry.” Her obsession with outward appearances, her facelifts, furs, and perfumes at a time when dungarees were all the fashion did not endear Kizer to them either. Because she loved men, many men, and was provocatively outspoken about her heterosexual preferences, she was soon no longer welcome at women’s conferences while earlier, dazzlingly brainy, she had been one of the main draws. Her almost palpable aversion to lesbians set her apart, too, an aversion that is difficult to place as—truly—some of her closest male friends (painters Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Arthur Hall Smith) were gay. Kizer was bound by contemporary prejudices, and, perhaps, even unconscious misogyny.
Kizer did not suffer fools gladly, even in the 1950s when women were supposed to be silently and subserviently smiling in the background. At the time, she was living in Seattle and married to Stimson Bullitt, heir to one of Seattle’s great fortunes. During this marriage, she had a long love affair with Abe Fortas, who went on to become Supreme Court Justice and trusted advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson. And when Kizer went to Pakistan as State Department specialist in 1964, she returned not only with poems and translations from Urdu, but also with a much younger Pakistani lover, whom she hid in the basement of her house in Georgetown. With him, she introduced the now so beloved ghazal to America.
Politics, from the first, was as important to her as poetry—the two were intertwined: “My interest in politics and international affairs goes just as deep as my feelings about poetry,” she said in 1967, adding some thirty years later that feminism is “an attitude towards life that affects, and afflicts, everything I do. But the one thing I want to emphasize about my feminism, something that’s only become a canon of official feminism in fairly recent times, is this concern with ecology, with saving what’s left of the world. . . . I’ve assimilated man’s degradation of the environment as a basic feminist concern. Rape is rape, whether it is a human being or a landscape.” Kizer was way ahead of her time.
96 Kizer’s best known poem, Pro Femina, still coruscates with unforgettable phrases: The entire poem may be read online here. The form is classically perfect, the diction crisp, the images chiseled, and it’s no accident that Kizer’s seemingly free verse has the lilt of elegiac metre. The poem repeatedly critiques female acquiescence and self-doubt, but always turns this into a call for higher self realization. It’s a proud poem! Kizer’s vision of what it means to be a woman is Promethean. I would disagree that people who teach Women’s Studies don’t read poetry—they do, they just don’t understand it.
But they’re not the only ones who could use a little help. I always thought scathingly brilliant lines like
Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine
Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me,
In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages.
reflected a 1970’s feminist rejection of the trapping of femininity. But your comment about her obsession with outer appearances suggests that her attitude here was more ambivalent. What can you, as Kizer’s biographer, tell us about how to approach Pro Femina?
MJ I shall answer your question as Kizer’s biographer, rather than as a critic of her poetry. Promethean, yes, that is a wonderful adjective to encompass “Pro Femina.” Kizer’s signature poem is innovative, creative and rebellious. I would add Augustan, because “Pro Femina” is the epitome of wit. Its message is serious, its manner playful. When I was hesitating about giving up my job, Kizer’s answer in an interview won me over to becoming her biographer. She used to get so many queries about the last line of the third section of “Pro Femina” (“And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep / free women,”) that she had a stamp made that said “Irony, Irony, Irony.” Having spent years on Isabella Gardner, a wonderful poet, but one whose poetry and life were fairly devoid of irony and laughter, Kizer’s adroit response delighted me. Later, reading thousands of her letters at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, I often burst out laughing, startling the serious scholars there. But I digress.
“Pro Femina” was no less than four decades in the making. Kizer wrote its first three parts after she had read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, published in America in 1953. The Second Sex had for her been like “being let out of the ghetto, out of jail.” Kizer was then the sole woman in an extraordinary talented group of Pacific Northwest poets, among them her beloved mentor Theodore Roethke and James Wright. But they were extraordinary sexist, too, and saw nothing in “Pro Femina.” It was finally published by her friend Reed Whittemore in his Carleton Miscellany in 1954 and later included in her second collection, Knock Upon Silence (1965). The reviews (mainly by men as there were few women reviewers at the time) were mixed. Catholic priest-critic John L’Heureux, for instance, was perceptive, suggesting that “Pro Femina” should “sweep all awards for bitchiness and wit and tumultuous insight.” Also Catholic, but far more conservative and representative of the reaction of most males, was the Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue, who characterized “Pro Femina” as “ brash, clever, and entirely pointless, a mistake.”
[Here MJ discusses Fanny, Kizer’s later continuation of Pro Femina, which may be read online here. ]
It was not until twenty years later that Kizer was again so moved by a book, this time Our Samoan Adventure by Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife Fanny. Fanny had selflessly devoted her life to her husband and only came to blossom as an artist after his death. “Closure was the real bitch, and I’m not sure it’s entirely right—may seem a bit rushed,” Kizer wrote after having wrestled with “Fanny” for over a decade. Nevertheless, she regarded “Fanny” as the capstone of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Yin (1984). I agree with Peter Stitt, though, who, while praising her for her metaphysical wit and intellectual imagery, commented cleverly that Kizer had tried to include everything she could think of as relevant to her subject—and therefore had mired the poem too much in detail.
[[Here MJ discusses The Erotic Philosophers, Kizer’s final addition to Pro Femina, which may be read online here. ]
Another decade went by before Kizer, after reading Peter Brown’s classic biography Augustine of Hippo (1967), started on the fifth and final part of “Pro Femina,” “The Erotic Philosophers.” This led her to revisit St. Augustine’s work as well as Kierkegaard’s, both of whom she had studied at Sarah Lawrence. Her last major poem, “The Erotic Philosophers,” denounces these two authoritative patriarchal philosophers for their negative attitudes towards women. In their view women were to blame for everything wrong with the world. “Yes it was always us, the rejected feminine / from whom temptation came. It was our flesh/with its deadly sweetness that led them on.” But where in the first parts of “Pro Femina” Carolyn had heaped ridicule on both men and women, in this final part she is—though still ingeniously funny—much softer, almost nostalgic. Looking back to her college days, she sees confused young college students, who struggle through “mires of misogyny,” but wear “tight sweaters to tease our shy professor.” Although she gave these two philosophers their just deserts, the poem ends in tolerance: “But we remain philosophic, and say with the Saint, / ‘Let me enter my chamber and sing my songs of love.’” “The Erotic Philosophers” is Kizer at its best, amusing and acerbic, yet elegant, celebrating intellect, passion and wit as the rightful tools of women writers.
“Pro Femina” came out as a chapbook in 2000 and was blurbed by Louis Simpson as “a poem that every woman whose spirit has been damaged should read.” He added ambiguously that “Men could read it too—it might open their eyes and improve their performance.” Publishers Weekly hailed it as a “first-wave feminist Ur-text.” Not everyone understood “Pro Femina” all that well, not even Julie Barrington in Women’s Review of Small Presses. She praised Kizer for being a feminist before Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, realizing that Kizer’s poems of the late fifties and early sixties — among them the first three parts of “Pro Femina” —were written at a time when “the female perspective was often unacceptable.” But she showed far less acumen in thinking it necessary to excuse Carolyn for her satirical portraits of woman writers in the first three parts of “Pro Femina,” “were it not for the sympathy that pervades the barbed humor together with the clearly articulated context of male oppression in which Kizer places these sometimes unflattering sketches.” To come back to your question after a long detour, Kizer not only mocked men and women, but also herself, as in the lines you quote. I hate to say it, but second wave feminists were not known for their sense of humor. At nearly eighty, Kizer states in her “Author’s Note” to the chapbook that its ending now seemed a bit “pallid and submissive” to her, “ an old ironclad feminist” and that, who knows, she might yet write another part, fitting for a new century. That was not to be.
Kizer’s collected poems, wittily named Calm, Cool and Collected, published in 2000 by Copper Canyon Press, is available from Amazon here. We will continue our conversation with Marian Janssen in the next issue. Picture of Carolyn Kizer courtesy of Copper Canyon Press.