There are nine poems in Night Palace, printed on a single sheet of paper – there must be a name for this somber yellow-orange¹ – which came in an envelope the other day from Sylvester Pollet’s remarkable Backwoods Broadsides, one of the best micropublishing projects around – one might go so far as to say The Dean of the One-Page Periodicals. The author is Joanne Kyger, about whom I’ve written before here and here. Reading her poems, which span a 13 month period from October 2003 to November 2004, I wonder if this really represents a full year’s work and, if so, if the collection of ten poems that are collected on the website run by (or for) Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek (he being the keyboard player of The Doors & the secret sauce behind some of the 1960s’ most iconic melodies), which date from March 2002 right up to October 2003, mean that these two publications gather together some 30 months’ worth of Kyger’s poetry.
Kyger has always been the most personal of poets – one might even say the most occasional, in that her poems have almost invariably captured some present moment. In fact, as I read her, presence is constantly the issue in her work. There are some ways in which she is the poet who most thoroughly represents that Buddhist perspective in poetry, more so even than Phil Whalen & Norman Fischer. So it is intriguing to see that three of the nine poems here are set in Iraq, that two focus on Carl Jung (one also bringing in, of all details, the Democratic Convention), and one is an elegy for Don Allen:
Once he took Richard Brautigan and me north out into
the wine country circa 1964 when it was really empty
and spring blossoms were on the trees
He’d point and Richard and I would run out from the car
and hack away at all the branches we could find
and finally the car was all filled up
When he dropped us off in the city
He took just one very shapely branch
& left us on the sidewalk
with this huge mound
of drooping greenery and blossoms
and drove away into the night
There are little moments in the construction of this poem – the capitalized He in the third stanza where grammar wouldn’t require it, even tho the poem doesn’t cap its left margins; the three words with double letters in that next-to-last line, a lushness to underscore the image – that are Kyger signatures. A simple enough poem that knows exactly what it wants to achieve & does so efficiently, with a light touch.
I first published some of Kyger’s poetry in the Chicago Review feature that I co-edited with David Melnick some 36 years. Kyger was herself just 36 at the time, already a decade beyond her first fabled trip to
