Naropa University
7 February 2005

JOANNE KYGER—WRITER OF THE JAPAN AND INDIA JOURNALS

During the Summer Writing Program of 2001, I had the Great opportunity to study with Joanne Kyger. Her workshop—INVESTIGATIVE POETICS—introduced such fellow writers as Ed Sanders, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn and Alice Notley. We read from Ed Sanders’ 1968: A History in Verse, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn’s epic poem “Gunslinger,” and Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses. Joanne repeated Spicer’s notion that poetry is a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. Joanne also told us about Spicer’s Poetry As Magic workshop that included Robert Duncan. She would probably approve of this statement made by Spicer in 1949 :

Live poetry is a kind of singing.
It differs from prose, as song does,
in its complexity of stress and intonation.
Poetry demands a human voice to sing it
and demands an audience to hear it.
Without these it is naked, pure,
and incompletely - a bore.*[1]

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 & attended Santa Barbara College. One day in January 1957 she drove up to San Francisco with [her] Siamese cat. She arrived at the height of the Howl obscenity trial, and a friend introduced her to The Place, the bar that was headquarters for Jack Spicer and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. She attended the Sunday Meetings lead by Spicer and Robert Duncan and gave her first reading at the Bread and Wine Mission in 1959 before moving to Japan with Gary Snyder. Joanne and Gary married in Japan, living there & also travelling to India (with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlofsky), events that are chronicled in Kyger's Japan and India Journals 1960-64. Kyger returned to San Francisco and published her first book The Tapestry and The Web. She moved to Bolinas in 1968 where she continues to reside, writing poetry, editing the local newspaper, and teaching (here) at Naropa University.[2]

Joanne Kyger’s writings include:

Phenomenological
Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
All This Everyday
Mexico Blonde
The Japan and India Journals
As Ever[3]
Just Space: Poems 1979-1989
Again: Poems 1989-2000

In my copy of The Japan and India Journals, which Joanne signed, she also inscribed this message: “Write in your journal…
Everyday!”

[1] http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/spicer-bio.html
[2] http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kyger/
[3] http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2003spring/kyger.shtml






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Bhanu Kapil, one of my teachers at Naropa, has allowed me to post
a poem that she wrote with Jack Collom, another teacher at Naropa.

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BREAKFAST ON A FOREIGN BALCONY

Hand-whipped water buffalo cream
Right down the gullet

A grizzle of whiskey in a cup
Filters through my mustache, heart, toes

I'm strong enough, perhaps, to massage the sky
But only in another country

Describe the coffee, there in the architecture
The coffee outlines the hand-cut tiles, with sensuous precision

Are we in the middle of an orange?
Espresso and tangerines for breakfast on a balcony

Are we near the sea? Is this Kolkata?
Or is this a synapse in the great dirt molecule?

Look, there's something flying overhead--
It's a real live animal - oh my god

Where I lived there were dark green hills
Shuddering in the whirl of the seasons

The animal lands. We speak. It says,
"Can I provide you with a dairy beverage for your tea?"

We clink our cups with our spoons
We smile. Each tooth is intricately carved

Meanwhile Evolution leans this way and that:
Means it's time for the waterbuffaloes to squirt their cream directly
into our coffee

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