Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
Friends of “Our One True Philosopher Poet” – guest editorial by David Rigsbee.
Excerpt from a forthcoming memoir: Three Teachers: Kizer, Brodsky, and Rorty.
“There are vast lacunae in my education,” Carolyn Kizer once remarked in an interview. From such a vivid and imposing woman, the admission can come across as a bit of false modesty. Surely there are such lacunae in everyone’s education, but it was nonetheless certainly true in her case. Yet this person did know things I wanted to learn.
She was a noted poet at the time I met her, and she would prove a gifted teacher. She became my first of three mentors, and her influence on me as I tried to rise artistically and intellectually through my twenties was profound and personal, lasting until her death in 2014. There were the principles to acquire and there was the example to meditate on. Not all of this experience was exemplary and warm, but she helped me to awaken and format my brain from its provincial moorings and enlarge the scope of my interests in poetry. Hence this memoir.
When she landed in North Carolina in 1970, Carolyn had bought a two-story, white frame house on the main street in Chapel Hill, not only next to the retired radio host but several doors down from the mansion housing the UNC System president William Friday, and immediately set about reworking it with built-in bookcases, a new kitchen, a sunroom for larger gatherings and a place to put the baby grand Steinway, a gift from old flame, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. She also had the driveway enlarged to accommodate what she expected would be a steady flow of visiting writers, students and assorted hangers-on.
Carolyn noted that she had always been “house lucky,” and the Franklin Street house did nothing to dispel her architectural fortune. It was a welcoming place, although it always seemed in some way under construction. When you walked in the first thing you saw was a foyer table fitted with books. The last thing you remembered of the house was its library and paintings. On the upstairs landing, one was greeted with a little painting by e.e. cummings. The foyer led straight to the living room. There were antique chairs, a marble coffee table groaning with books, mostly poetry and art monographs. These were stacked a dozen or so at a time, some sideways so that the entire table was covered.
You could always find the latest publications right there before you. This included literary magazines, a discovery for me: The Hudson Review, Kayak, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The New England Review, The Paris Review.
When the drinks came, as they always did in the afternoon, you had to set yours down in the little canyons carefully, like landing a helicopter in a ravine. In fact, every flat surface in the living room and sunroom was overrun with two sort of books, in the former, it was predominately poetry; in the latter, oversized art books of her favorites: the Renaissance usuals—Cimabue, Giotto, et al., followed by Impressionists and Modernists, both European and American art for the young mind’s genuflection. There was also much Asian art: Japanese and Chinese drawings in particular. Her tabletops presented little in the way of English stalwarts like Constable or Turner (Blake was excepted), and her American painters were western-heavy, from Tobey to Diebenkorn.
Off to the side was Carolyn’s study, a niche of a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with poetry: the contemporary collections in alphabetical order, older books by period. You could be forgiven for missing the white writer’s desk. It was tiny, especially considering the expanse of the owner. Sitting on it was a portable electric typewriter, and next to it was a stack of correspondence. As with nearly all poets of her generation, she composed in notebooks first and didn’t take to the typewriter until the poem was mostly finished.
Her script was always legible, nearly calligraphic, and it never gave off a whiff of haste. I quickly learned her pen strokes mirrored her taste for classical Chinese calligraphy. Around the house one encountered screens, filled with beautiful slashes and the hint of serene meaning. While the study was small, it felt like the symbolic heart of the house. Often I would slip into this study to browse. It was there that I first encountered names of international poets in translation that I would know well a year or two hence: Amichai, Paz, Parra, Ritsos, Montale, Bonnefoy, et al., as well as English poets: Hughes, Middleton, Larkin, Pitter, and Wain.
Many guest poets ensued in person, and unannounced surprises were frequent. As a result we had a backstage pass to many of the poetry worthies of the time. Her friend Robert Creeley was especially welcome. Carolyn sang the virtues of Creeley’s poems and read them to us in class, pausing and pointing out their miniature virtues. At the time, they were chiefly collected in For Love and Words, copies of which were always available at The Intimate Bookstore, which was the place for poets looking for poets to follow. It was there that I found the Creeley’s Scribner books, along with other small-press publications that bore his name.
I didn’t then understand the significance of the emerging small press movement (why would you publish a collection with a press nobody had heard of, when you could have Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s publisher?) For Creeley, it looked to be a collaboration and acknowledgment of bookmaking as an art, as well as a matter of local loyalty—and poets of the Black Mountain/Beat persuasion were loyal to each other and supportive in material, as well as intangible ways.
One one occasion, the legendary Robert Creeley had scheduled a reading at Duke, and we were to pick him up from a house in Durham where there was an afternoon party in his honor. When we arrived, there was no Creeley. The guests stood around on the grass of a clapboard house on Broad Street in Durham, smoking and drinking wine. Carolyn looked about, then walked out to the sidewalk and asked startled passersby, “Anybody seen a long-haired, one-eyed poet dressed in black? He’s needed for work!” As if stepping from behind a curtain, Creeley appeared, smiling, having spent an hour walking around the neighborhood and visiting a bakery.
Creeley was not a great reader of his own poems, however. As we were driving over to Durham, Carolyn had said that his quiet, small-parceled delivery was the result of years of pot-smoking, and indeed Creeley himself spoke of his consumption in his letters to her. When about to leave the gathering to deliver Creeley to the reading room, he turned to the hangers-on (me included), and asked, “Shall we turn on before the reading?” Carolyn, who avoided weed for the most part, even though it was plentiful, often parodied Creeley’s recitation style, exaggerating the discontinuities and disjunctions that were the hallmark of his smart, Fabergé poems. She did this not to make light of her friend, whose poems also pointed to a concern with stuttering, with the initiating procedures of saying in general, but to suggest what happens when the voice mimics the vocal score embodied in the form.
He was indeed turned on at a reading at Duke with a Harpo-thatched Gregory Corso, who read a short story (or was it a narrative poem?) about a suicide by bicycle. As the speaker in the poem neared the tree with which he intended to collide, Corso became more and more worked up. No one would have been surprised if he had actually passed out. Carolyn turned to me and uttered, “Ugh!” Creeley followed with a few poems and then a short story.
I noticed that my 8th grade English teacher, a proper, 60-plus gray-bunned woman with a shoulder tic, sat a few rows ahead of us. Creeley’s story slowly surfed into an endless description of a facial activity we came to realize as a blowjob. Carolyn had only one comment, “I don’t think that was the best choice.” As we exited, along with the rest of the sullen crowd, I spied the dapper and proper novelist Reynolds Price standing with his arms crossed. “How did you like that?” I asked. His eyes widened. “I should have made a citizen’s arrest!”
Lapses in conventional taste aside, Creeley was at this best when talking about poems. Carolyn deferred to him and liked to pitch him questions when students were present at the Franklin Street house. I can’t say that I always understood his replies. His recursively cadenced sentences sounded programmatic and abstract, laced with a jargon with which I was not familiar, and yet I understood that they were grounded in the alt-Pound school of poetics, the paideuma, by way of Olson, Duncan, and Zukofsky, and so I turned to these doyens, where, like many of my fellow poets, I found at last a lexicon and an approach to poems that didn’t creak with the academic idiom with which we had been brought up—and from which so many of our peers had been turned off, many permanently.
Carolyn was no friend of abstract or of programmatic ways of approaching poetry, but she was respectful of the Pound tradition which was, at the least, practical. Part of this was her lifelong equal preference for Asian-facing, west coast aesthetics, as a balance to European east coast ones.
She longed to escape the smudge of Spokane, but embracing traditional Western ideals of beauty was not enough. She was drawn as easily to the classicism of Po Chu-I as to the 17th century poets, many of whose poems she had committed to memory. She had little interest in the lights of the Beat Movement or the Black Mountain poets as such, although she praised Snyder and Levertov, as well as Creeley, and paid respect to Olson, but she also held to discriminations. She thought Creeley brilliant and promoted his poems all her life, but she chalked up his support for the Beats, including the second-rate, to loyalty. She once remarked, on hearing that Ginsberg had been coronated as “King of Prague” that there were “at least a hundred” American poets more talented.
She felt the same way about Whalen, McLure, Corso, Spicer, Lamantia, et al. She spoke well of Duncan, not for his poems with their sometimes antiquated diction, but for his benign influence on behalf of the core of poetry, and she approved of his passion for mythology. Her reverence for Snyder included her recommendation of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, as offering some of the best examples of anti-establishment verse (which is to say they didn’t fly on the wings of rhetoric).
They were about hard work among hard workers and discovering what the land had to offer, away from institutions and offices. He was an authentically environmental poet before the Zeitgeist arrived, bringing with it young poets eager to supersede the tradition that created self-conscious nature poets whose work could be traced to Emerson, Thoreau and finally Woodsworth and the English Romantics. She was devoted to poets from across the spectrum, but when it came to schools, she was non-aligned.
James Dickey, in nearby South Carolina, was perhaps the most conspicuous southern poet during Carolyn’s years at UNC, and he was among the visitors. When his status—and finances—suddenly cantilevered by the disturbingly depraved hillbilly thriller Deliverance, starring Bert Reynolds, a blockbuster movie in which Dickey played a bit part, he was regularly on the phone to update her on his triumphs. Which she would then dish to us, along with commentary. “Jim Dickey called me last night. He was drunk, naturally, and kept saying, ‘I’ve just made a million dollars! A million dollars!’ Then Maxine took the phone away from him and begin apologizing. I’m fond of Maxine, but she puts up with a lot. I know I wouldn’t.”
Dickey had put a lot of face time with Carolyn when she worked at the NEA in Washington. He would show up with his son, Christopher, according to Carolyn’s daughter Jill, and the two teens would disappear into the basement for soulful conversation, while the parentals discussed the state of poetry overhead. Although she didn’t take to his poems glorifying war and was quick to interject that his bombing run poems were “pure imagination,” she nonetheless thought highly of his early work. She read his popular “Cherrylog Road” to us and listed his virtues: his point of view, attention to detail, his clean-but-charged language, his evident passion.
David Wagoner was later to say that Dickey was smart enough to compensate for his deficiencies of voice: “If you don’t have your own voice you’re going to have to conceal the fact. Dickey had no ear but arranged poems to take the fact into account.” His guitar-picking and posturing didn’t make much headway with her, but as for his poems, she considered him among the best male poets of his generation, by whom she meant Wright, Hugo, Bly (she rarely failed to mention his “smelly” pancho), John Haines, and Merwin.
Years later, when Steven Ford Brown’s and my Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry came out, I told her that Steven and I had asked each other to name his pick for the best poet among the twenty eight included in the book, and we both replied “Dickey” over the phone at the same time. Carolyn concurred that his standing was high, pointing out that there was a lot of competition in the anthology, including the likes of Ransom, Justice, and Warren.
Of Robert Bly, with whom he was often mentioned in the same sentence, despite their somewhat disaligned politics, Carolyn said that, like Bly, the true Dickey had been eclipsed by his commercial book success. In Bly’s case, it was the publication of Iron John, his best-seller redefining masculinity in an age of rising feminism. Bly called for a “rewilding” of men to find more positive (and acceptable ) images of masculinity, but in Carolyn’s eyes it was just “Silly rich Boy Scouts whooping and jumping over fires in their jock straps. You don’t make better men by taking them out into the woods.”
Meanwhile, Dickey became a frequent caller, and she overlooked miles of her own reservations to focus on the value of his natural poetic sense. “Jim’s the real thing, certainly the finest southern poet, whatever you think that may mean.” At the same time, she seemed to inflect his notoriety with humor. “Jim has a new come-on.
Now he just walks up to girls on the street and says, ‘wanna fuuuck?'” she drawled, drawing out the vowels. ‘”Is that the best he can do? It’s outrageous! Jim was a real poet before he started writing fiction. I think the success just went to his head, and he lost his critical sense. He was also one of the best critics of poetry in the country—and a hard critic too.
Now he thinks anything he writes is only going to increase his stature, but it doesn’t work like that.” “Jim called me up the other night and announced that he was going to be riding on an elephant in a parade. The booze has wrecked him. Even his ridiculous, never-ending skirt-chasing hasn’t hurt his poetry, only his reputation. I remember when he was a serious young man before he became a success. Now he doesn’t defer to anybody, just cranks out his unreadable new poems.”
In the back of her mind, Jim was a funhouse reflection of Roethke, a mansplaining yet serious craftsman who numbered many women poets among his peers. One day in the late ’90s, she mused, “Jim used to compare himself to Roethke. When Cal Lowell died, he said, ‘Now it’s just me and Ted’. Can you imagine?” I brought the recorded lecture, popularly known as “Dickey’s Last Class” to her attention. The title was not aspirational: it was in fact his last class, conducted at home in Columbia by his son Chris. Carolyn was in her decline but read Jim’s remarks with interest. “He’s right, you know,” was her response.
In the lecture, Jim Dickey had elevated the poet to the status of a modern hierophant who interprets the mysteries and rescues meaning from the chaos and reversibles of modern life that leave so many humans at a loss. “The feeling that we are living existences in which nothing matters very much, or at all: that is what’s behind all the drugs and the alcoholism and suicide—insanity, wars, everything—a sense of non-consequence. A sense that nothing, nothing matters.
No matter which way we turn it is the same thing. But the poet is free of that.” Carolyn was not herself someone who subscribed to the notion of the truth-bearing of last words, or of oracular proclamations generally. Her quips were more barbed, as in “Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.” She was memorable in her maxims without sounding apocalyptic. And yet, at bottom, she sided with Dickey.
One day, when Jill and I were vacationing with friends at Pawleys Island in South Carolina, we found ourselves before Dickey’s grave at the Anglican All Saints Church, and there fenced in stone, the Spanish moss hanging in folds, we found the grave. At the bottom of the epitaph, in caps was the motto “I MOVE AT THE HEART OF THE WORLD.” It was the last line of one of his most memorable poems, recalling his childhood with his deceased brother, “In the Treehouse at Night,” a poem that certainly resonated with me too, as I had a similar story and poem.
Carolyn’s final piece in her collected poems was “The Erotic Philosophers,” which she considered one of her most mature works. The poem ends with a quotation from St. Augustine: “Let me enter my chamber and sing my songs of love” (Confessions, Book VII). The poem is about the fear of women in the work of Augustine and Kierkegaard. In the poem, the old-fashioned dread of women arose and grew, was denounced, then repressed, as God was inserted into the philosophical mind. The male mind, that is. Kafka it was, I think, who said that in the last analysis, the world isn’t ironic. It was Charles Simic, no less, who wrote to Carolyn: “You’re our one true philosopher poet.” Having eviscerated the timid sage in her poem, Carolyn finally joins her voice with his and replaces his title “philosopher” with the truer, but more elusive, “Saint.”
As our friendship grew down the years, she would first look askance at my pursuit of a graduate degree, then ask, when we had settled, “So tell me. What’s Derrida all about?” She did have a soft spot for philosophers, as her attachment and affectionate down-scaling of a Sarah Lawrence professor of philosophy, as well as her late poem, “The Erotic Philosophers,” showed. While that poem satirized thinkers like Kierkegaard for paling in the face of passion, she took passion as her leap of faith. She dipped into Nietzsche, but more likely came to him second-hand through the then-popular work of Walter Kaufmann.
She had no use for the existentialists (du Beauvoir excepted), structuralists, French deconstructionists, or for that matter, anyone whose work smacked of theory. While she sedulously avoided abstraction in her own work, she did maintain that “poets get their ideas from philosophers.” Be that as it may, Carolyn’s patience for philosophical digging was not unlimited. What philosophical ideas seeped into her poems arrived, if they arrived at all, by memory or by hearsay. In the end, her depths were lyrical, her faultless ear more to be trusted than her brain.
She often spoke fondly of her history teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Renaissance scholar Charles Trinkaus, author of books on Italian humanism. She maintained a long and affectionate relationship with Trinkaus, and I remember meeting him in the 1980s, when Carolyn and husband John had moved to Sonoma. He was sitting by the swimming pool in a business suit and seemed much interested to learn what had become, not of his own student, but of his student’s student. I liked him immediately and frowned inwardly at Carolyn’s patronizing accounts of her beloved teacher. He was clearly more Erasmus than brainy schlemiel.
Later she no doubt felt vindicated in her avoidance of postmodernism when the Times obituary of Trinkaus quoted a colleague as saying, “’What set him and the tradition of Renaissance studies he represented apart from the scholarly tradition that followed was a deep belief that past writers and their texts could not be understood without careful historical study.” He, therefore, “had little patience for the post-modernists and deconstructionists who preached that texts had to be separated from their pasts.”
She was like her teachers, logocentric to the tips of her writing hand. It was one of the things that set her apart from the next wave of feminist writers, whose adoption of theoretical approaches struck her as a kind of unproductive professionalism, even as it reminded her that her aesthetics, like her politics, were rooted in a tradition somehow under threat, although the enemy was often murky or out of view.
On the one hand, she derived reassurance from her teachers—Campbell and Roethke; on the other, she maintained a distant apprehension about the postmodern turn, wanting to know if there was something in it that she ought to know. “I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about” became a recurring phrase, along with the familiar arch snub, “Never heard of him!”
In Sonoma, as in Chapel Hill, she would perch on her couch, drink nearby, and launch conversational openers: “You know, John Stuart Mill may have said it all, but it wouldn’t have occurred to him to say it had he not read Mary Wollstonecraft first.” “There are very few thinkers who come by their thoughts sui generis. I would make an exception with de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf. Wouldn’t you, David?” This was taken as an invitation to push back, and I often did—which pleased her. You could tell by her Cheshire Cat smile that took in a pause after I made my reply.
As with a lot of poets I came to know, like Judy Sherwin Johnson and Nikki Giovanni, Carolyn liked to make global pronouncements outlining the way things really stood. And they were often plausible, although sometimes not so much. She possessed the confidence of core ideas and could expound them at length: the psychological springs of misogyny, the frame of the civilized world that poems embodied and passed along; the often self-subversive torch-carriers of tragedy, the Olympian role of satire.
I raise these anecdotes as images involving the philosophical arm of my mentor’s thinking as she approached her own work. She wanted there to be a philosophically resonant element to poems, and her own works reflects this desire. I took this from her, and I see it in the work of my contemporaries, whether they admit to it or not. That doesn’t matter—the fact is that poets show their hands, and they do so regardless of whether this is top-of-mind for them or not, despite the stories, points of reference, the embarrassing details, even the fates of the players. If Carolyn, Creeley, Dickey, or others are remembered (if at all), their work reveals examples of a worldview we should keep in focus, if not reclaim.
© David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others.
In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems, was just published by Black Lawrence Press.