Carolyn Kizer

“As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.”

“I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano.”

“I tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife.”

“I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.”

“You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.”

“I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back.”

“I've been enormously fortunate. People say, 'How do you feel about your reputation?' My real belief is that I have exactly the reputation I deserve... on the whole, I feel comfortable with myself.”

“I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.”

“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.”

“No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.”

“I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo.”

“from "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name!-- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best.And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once,while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business.And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more.We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers.But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,and passion, its bloody labor,its birth and rebirth and decay.”

“Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives.”

“I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.”

“We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.”