I’ve said this before, I know, but if there is one poet whose work rests at the absolute center of American poetry over the past 50 years – the point at which all other literary tendencies (at least all the post-avant ones) converge, that poet is Joanne Kyger. Having, I believe, studied with Hugh Kenner in UC Santa Barbara, Kyger arrived in San Francisco in the mid-50s in time to briefly marry Gary Snyder, leading to various adventures in Asia with him  & Allen Ginsberg, was the one straight woman to have been completely integrated as a writer into the Spicer Circle*, became John Wieners’ best buddy, working for KQED television before moving out to the Bolinas mesa where her neighbors over the years have included such folk as Phil Whalen, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lewis Mac Adams Jr., Bill Berkson, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Jim Carroll & Robert Grenier. As a result, she not only has some visible relationship to every aspect of the New American poetry of the 1950s, but you can also hear her influence everywhere from Naropa to the later generations of the NY School to langpo.** Get a fix on Joanne Kyger & a half century of American poetry suddenly comes clearly into focus.

 

I’ve just received & read – twice already – Kyger’s newest book, Ten Shines, published in an edition of 125 copies in venerable photocopied-pages-stapled-on-the-left format by Larry Fagin’s Nijinsky Suicide Health Club.*** Shines, to the degree that they’re a form & not “just” a work, are prose poems, none longer than a page, two just a single paragraph, such as “Shine Four”:

 

Pacing behind the Footsteps of Spring, I win the view. One big drop off into the ocean blue. Last week it blew so terrifically out here the cypress got a permanent wave. And homonyms make the last simple magic along the sidelines of sound. Hurrah! Take a seat, a low seat.

 

On the surface, a poem like this is so straightforward as to appear artless. Narratively, very little occurs – a person comes to the edge of a bluff overlooking the ocean & sits down. But consider all the little balances at work in this verbal machine. The aptly named Footsteps of Spring are a brilliant yellow wildflower common enough along the ocean in California. The yellow offsets vividly the blue of the ocean, the most common of all contrasts in the “golden hills” of California.+ Footsteps of Spring serves a second very different linguistic function, contextualizing the action Pacing, identifying the poem itself as a nature lyric. The second half of the first sentence dramatizes the arrival, just overblown enough to come across as lighthearted & slightly comic. The second sentence places a limit – I can even imagine a junior league Fred Crews constructing a psychoanalytic interpretation of this poem as “about Death,” predicated entirely on this sentence. At one level – not a terribly important one – maybe that’s so, but what impresses me more is how this articulation of the absolute – “one big drop off” – sets up the fourth sentence, which at first seems to be entirely about the power of nature. Which, in turn, is why the fifth sentence, beginning with the conjunction And seems initially out of place. Indeed, even at permanent wave we sense the disruption. But now Kyger is calling our attention not to the ocean, sky or flora, but to the materiality of the signifiers in the poem – blue and blew not only demonstrate their own magic, but call up further the earlier rhyme with view, which only heightens our sense of how Footsteps of Spring operates on two entirely different semantic planes. Hurrah indeed, a word whose content here is its own celebration of its lack of content. Which is why the final sentence has to be a command – the presence of these two radically different paths of magic – the view & language itself – demands attention & humility. The poem is as much about the cultural domain of language as it is about the process of staring off into the distance from the Bolinas mesa. These two realms don’t come together until the exclamation of the penultimate sentence. The final one literally is the moral to our story.

 

It would be easy to make some extravagant claim at this point about Kyger’s work in Ten Shines but the simpler truth is that she’s been this good for decades, creating works that on the surface look so apparent but which offer exceptional depth & richness to any closer reading. In fact, what strikes me most about Ten Shines isn’t this aspect of her work at all, but rather how political it’s becoming – “Why is everyone except Michael Moore so stupid,” “We don’t need to perfume a disaster” – a level of social engagement that I hadn’t recognized in her writing before.++

 

Kyger never precisely explains the category “shines,” as such. There is a single use of the term in the first piece, literally as part of the phrase “if you shine it on.” But I don’t think that’s what she’s getting at ultimately, but rather something much closer to the ontological implications of the word Hurrah! If culture & nature are the polarity under view in ”Shines Four,” novelty & perfection are the opposed aspects in the first piece, loss & chocolate (or comfort) in the second, consciousness  & dirt in the third, and so on. Each piece seems built out of such an opposition & what “shines” is that aspect the two share when understood as not really opposed. “Shines” in this sense is more akin to the agency of light. Pound would have called it virtu and buried it in the stuffed pillows of his crackpot scholarship. Kyger just raises that sphere of light for all to see. Hurrah.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Fran Herndon was & is a visual artist active in that context all these long years.

 

** You can see Kyger’s hand in how Bob Perelman uses humor & in Grenier’s focus on presentness, a direct extension of her Zen-based aesthetics.

 

*** “Allen Ginsberg’s name for his imaginary dance company.”

 

+ Thus the colors of the University of California are blue & gold.

 

++ With the notable exception of her dour registrations of the sexism of male poets, something that shows up in her work nearly 15 years before second-wave feminism.