Carolyn Kizer - Poetry 2003 - Key West Literary Seminar

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Kim Addonizio
John Ashbery
Lucille Clifton
Billy Collins
Robert Creeley
Martín Espada
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Carolyn Forché
Forrest Gander
Dan Gerber
Jane Hirshfield
Carolyn Kizer
Dorianne Laux
Semezdin Mehmedinović
Sharon Olds
Charles Simic
James Tate
Quincy Troupe
Derek Walcott
Richard Wilbur
C. D. Wright

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TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL
Key West Literary Seminar

the beautiful changes
poetry 2003

Carolyn Kizer
Read Carolyn Kizer's Reunion

Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1925. She is the author of eight books of poetry: Cool Calm & Collected (Copper Canyon Press, 2000); Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 (1996); The Nearness of You: Poems for Men (1986); Yin (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984); Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (1971); Knock Upon Silence (1965); and The Ungrateful Garden (1961). She has also written Picking and Choosing: Prose on Prose (1995), Proses: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1994), and Carrying Over: Translations from Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Hebrew and French-African (1986), and edited 100 Great Poems by Women (1995) and The Essential Clare (1992). In 1959, she founded Poetry Northwest and served as its editor until 1965. From 1966 to 1970, she served as the first Director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, the John Masefield Memorial Award, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. She is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and lives in Sonoma, California, and Paris.

Reunion

For more than thirty years we hadn't met.
I remembered the bright query of your face,
That single-minded look, intense and stern,
Yet most important--how could I forget?--
Was what you taught me inadvertently
(tutored by books and parents, even more
By my own awe at what was yet to learn):
The finest intellect can be a bore.

At this, perhaps our final interview,
Still luminous with your passion to instruct,
You speak to that recalcitrant pupil who
Inhaled the chalk-dust of your rhetoric.
I nod, I sip my wine, I praise your view,
Grateful, my dear, that I escaped from you.

© Carolyn Kizer (1996)

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