April 2, 2002
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@sa.ucsb.edu
UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Santa Barbara Poetry Festival present Pulitzer Prize winning poet Carolyn Kizer reading at UCSB Corwin Pavilion
Summary Facts:
- Carolyn Kizer
- An Evening with the Poet
- Pulitzer Prize winning writer
- Author of Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960-2000
- A Santa Barbara Poetry Festival event
- Part of National Poetry Month
- Wednesday, May 1
- 7:30 pm / UCSB Corwin Pavilion
- Free event
- Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Kizer, whose passionate and witty poetry has graced American letters for over 40 years, will be reading from her work on Wednesday, May 1 at 7:30 pm in the UCSB Corwin Pavilion. This is a free event. As a poet, critic, translator and teacher, Kizer has shaped the course and discourse of American poetry for nearly half a century. She has been equally influential as a feminist and activist; her 1999 resignation (along with Maxine Kumin) from the Academy of American Poets helped lead to reform in that organization, which has since become more inclusive to women and writers of color. Kizer’s books include Mermaids in the Basement, The Nearness of You, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Yin and Cool, Calm & Collected, an overview of her career that gathers new poems with selections from previous volumes, some of which have been out-of-print for years. The San Francisco Chronicle calls Kizer “one of the best poets around...a national treasure,” while poet William Matthews claims, “Sharp, smart and tender, her poetry restores, redresses and delights.”
In 1959, Kizer founded Poetry Northwest, currently the oldest magazine in the U.S. that publishes nothing but poetry, and she 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. Among her many accomplishments in that post was persuading President Lyndon Johnson to lift a ban against Chilean poet Pablo Neruda from entering the United States. In addition to her Pulitzer Prize, 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. Kizer has been poet-in-residence at many universities including Columbia, Stanford, Princeton and the University of Arizona.
Kizer’s poetry remains hard to classify as she has never aligned herself with any particular style of verse. Her writing can be formal or free verse, philosophical or personal. Despite her wide-ranging formal concerns, her social and feminist beliefs have guided her subject matter throughout her career. Perhaps her most famous poem is the multi-part “Pro Femina,” which she has published in sections over the decades. Its first section, published in the 1960s, includes the lines: “We are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:/ Merely the private lives of one half of humanity.”
In its starred review of Cool, Calm & Collected, Booklist wrote, “The stately power of her verse has never failed her. No library should be without this collection.” Meanwhile The New York Times Book Review praised the book, noting, “‘Observe the world with desperate affection,’ [Kizer] wrote in the 70’s. This collection, which includes translations from a dizzying number of foreign poets, is ample proof that she’s spent a lifetime taking her own good advice.”
This reading by Carolyn Kizer is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and the Santa Barbara Poetry Festival. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Carolyn Kizer will be available for purchase and signing.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.