In this interview with Carolyn Kizer’s biographer, we discuss her poem Semele Recycled;
Kizer’s collected poems, wittily named Calm, Cool and Collected, published in 2000 by Copper Canyon Press, is available from Amazon here.
96 Semele Recycled (this link will bring you to the text of the complete poem) is quite complicated . The title references the myth of Semele, a mortal woman loved by Zeus, who was obliterated by the sight of his unmuffled godhood. Yet the dismemberment, and re-assembly of the Semele in this poem, ending in an erotic encounter, suggests more the way Isis collected and reconstructed murdered Osiris to father Horus on her.
But the mythic outline seems more a vehicle for two great insights into women’s condition and potential predicaments:
Women’s learned tendency to people please, and seek approval, even to the point of self-destructive self-sacrifice.
Women’s identification of the physical body with the self, their greater sense of being present in the material world, which can lead to a truly sociable engagement with the landscape (as in Emily Dickinson). Carried to an extreme, as here, this becomes a sense of being incorporated into the organic world, a loss of one’s definite self in what Camille Paglia called “the blurring of feminine sfumato.”
So, could you tell us about the date and origin of the poem, the mythological referents, and either confirm or criticise my suggestions as to how this poem addresses women’s societally encouraged self-subordination, and their sometimes overwhelming engagement with the physical world?
MJ “I love that poem. I think if I had one poem that I had to be remembered for, I’d probably choose that,” Kizer said in a radio interview in 1985 with Studs Terkel. Thinking about the poem now, I see that it gradually unsettled some assumptions I once brought to it myself. Your perceptive questions made me realize—to my shame—that I had never really wondered about the near-absence of Egyptian mythology in Kizer’s poetry, especially striking given that the work of Joseph Campbell, author of the watershed study The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), is steeped in it. Campbell was Kizer’s teacher at Sarah Lawrence during World War II and, as she noted in that same interview, she could not “imagine what my work would be like if I hadn’t known Campbell.” She was enthralled by him—to the point that she began dreaming about archetypes and myths. They became grist for her writer’s mill. Campbell opened vistas that Kizer had long inhabited intuitively and imaginatively, but which now came into focus on a conscious, intellectual level.
The poetry Kizer wrote in the 1950s, thick with mythological allusion—poems such as “Hera, Hung from the Sky” and “Persephone Pauses”—clearly bears his influence. “Semele Recycled,” written much later, in the 1970s, shows something else: Campbell’s ideas fully metabolized. This savage, extended simile details the brutal dismemberment of Semele after her lover Zeus abandons her. It also narrates how, in the end, her scattered body parts reassemble eagerly when she returns to him—though always re-membering their having once been torn apart. Campbell taught that myths are not static: that in earlier versions, women rather than men were often the protagonists; that myths could be reshaped, retold, recycled. That insight proved essential to Kizer’s work.
But Kizer did not follow Campbell slavishly. Prompted by your question, I checked—using a brute-force Finder search—how often she refers to Egyptian mythology in her poems, letters, and interviews. The answer: hardly ever. Greek mythology, by contrast—its gods and goddesses—appears easily and often. Egyptian myth seems, largely, to leave her cold.
Why? “Semele Recycled” offers an answer. Greek and Egyptian myth emerge from fundamentally different imaginative worlds. In Campbell’s Egyptian universe, order is privileged over conflict; damage is repaired; hierarchy—and with it patriarchy—is restored. Kizer had no interest in restoring patriarchy. She is drawn instead to contradiction, imbalance, tension, and risk. You mention Isis. Isis knows exactly what she is doing: she gathers Osiris piece by piece, applies ritual knowledge, restores the body, and reestablishes order so Horus can be born.
In the original Greek myth—not Kizer’s retelling—Semele desires certainty. Tricked by Zeus’s jealous wife Hera, she demands that her lover reveal himself in his full divine glory. When he does, she is annihilated. Zeus rescues their unborn son, Dionysus, from her womb, stitches him into his thigh, and later gives birth to him. Semele disappears. Dionysus matters. An early title for Kizer’s poem was “Confessions of Dionysus.” She abandoned it. She did not want a man to be the protagonist. She turns the myth inside out.
The poem originated after Kizer underwent minor gynecological surgery. Reflecting on the fact that women lose parts of themselves over the course of a lifetime—biologically, socially, erotically—it occurred to her that the Dionysus story had always been about a woman. “The whole dismemberment number is obviously a female myth that got distorted and transformed over the centuries,” she said in a later interview. In Kizer’s version, Dionysus is not even mentioned.
Isis resurrects her husband and stabilizes the patriarchal order. Kizer’s Semele does nothing of the sort. Her survival is not orderly. She returns to Zeus knowing exactly who he is, knowing how it ends—and she chooses him anyway. She chooses sex, intensity, pleasure, mutual desire, with no illusion of permanence and no fantasy of protection. This is not Isis restoring a husband so the world can continue unchanged. Kizer’s Semele insists on desire without moralization. That feels startlingly modern—and unmistakably feminist. Many of Kizer’s students, young feminists, were outraged by the ending. How could Semele return to that bastard Zeus, eyes wide open? I initially read the poem that way myself—as masochism, as a woman pleasing a man. I no longer do. That reading makes Semele passive, and she is anything but. She is not trying to be good, acceptable, or properly loved. She understands the structure of the encounter and enters it anyway—not for him, but for the experience itself. There is nothing self-effacing here. If anything, it is defiant. Semele is not offering herself up to be consumed. She chooses intensity, pleasure, and return, fully aware of the cost. That is a different kind of agency.
Like most of Kizer’s poems, “Semele Recycled” is deeply autobiographical. At the time of writing, she was consumed by her love for Stefan Haag—an extraordinarily gifted opera singer and arts administrator. “I am so alive I could die,” she wrote in the summer of 1968, echoing Theodore Roethke. Months later she wrote Haag: “Time enough to die and be reborn and die again.” A draft poem enclosed with that letter makes clear how unprocessed passion became sexual language on the page. Her letters reinforce the Donnean sense of dying as climaxing—a reference Kizer, steeped in the Metaphysical poets, certainly intended in “Semele Recycled,” too. Semele’s death is crude, violent, excessive—and orgasmic.
Fifteen years later, married to John Woodbridge, Kizer met Haag again in Australia. He was dying of cancer. In a draft poem she called him “her sad and broken bull”—no accident, given Zeus’s metamorphosis in the Semele myth. “Semele Recycled,” then, is a love poem. But not only that. It is also a poem about fragmentation: about how we are real to others only in parts. Synecdochically, Semele is a vagina to her lover; a nipple to a child. What Kizer refuses, however, is the sentimental version of what Camille Paglia called feminine “sfumato”—the blurring or dissolving of the self into nature or relation. Semele does not lose herself unconsciously or passively. Her dispersal is willed, lucid, and temporary. This is not the erasure of identity, but its radical testing under conditions of desire.
One last thing matters here. “Semele Recycled” is one of the very few poems Kizer wrote almost unrevised. She herself called it a “freebie,” a poem that arrived whole, without the usual years of polishing, tightening, and second-guessing. That matters, because the poem’s power lies partly in its refusal of decorum: it is graphic, excessive, grotesquely physical. But it is also extremely funny. Kizer never relinquishes her comic intelligence. The dismemberment is over-the-top, the imagery deliberately blunt, almost slapstick in its insistence, and the poem’s sheer visual audacity keeps it from tipping into solemnity or self-pity. That combination—erotic extremity, mythic violence, and wicked humor—is quintessentially Kizer. The poem refuses tragedy as a moral posture. It insists instead on vitality, appetite, and wit. That is why I love it.
The Photo of Kizer by John Palmer, courtesy of Ashley Bullitt