This collection of Joanne Kyger's work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger is a poet of place, with a strong voice-delicate, graceful, and never wasteful; her poems explore themes of friendship, love, community, and morality and draw on Native American myth as well as Asian religion and philosophy. Kyger's love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of the everyday. Edited with a foreword by Michael Rothenberg, and with an introduction by poet David Meltzer, this book is a marvelous overview of a wonderfully challenging and important poet.

As Ever: Selected Poems (Penguin Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Kyger, Joanne

Literary

Penguin Publishing Group

On Time is Joanne Kyger's first full-length collection of poetry in nearly a decade. Beginning in 2005, in the throes of the endless wars of the Bush administration, and proceeding chronologically to 2014, On Time may be seen as the day book of a master poet, moving between the personal and the political, the natural and the spiritual in a restless quest for sanity. Reflecting her practice of Zen Buddhism, and her long engagement with environmentalism, On Time is a profound examination of contemporary culture from a perspective of wisdom and maturity, permeated with righteous indignation and fierce criticism.
Praise for On Time:
"On Time offers exquisite panoramic views of eternity. It reads like an early morning drive up the coast with sunlight showing through the branches. Joanne's words gain a perfect stillness hanging in the air. They sound in our mind then dissolve to a hairline edge. Glide with the turn. Get blown away. There is no greater voice in American poetry."—Cedar Sigo
"Oh reader, you can just relax and spend hour upon hour inside Joanne Kyger’s On Time, Poems 2005-2014, for oodles of pleasure and line-fun! Kyger beautifully observes her life and times. She’s realistic, yet graceful and good-willed, annotating herself, her friends and acquaintances, while definitely saying no to Sartre’s dictum, 'hell is other people.' What a graceful, complicated and wonderful book!"Ed Sanders
"Like the double meaning of the title, Kyger’s poems speak to the phenomenologicalboth to the observations of the state of being and to one's own placement in the world. Her poems step / about entering into an agreement / with the page of the moment'. Working elegantly, tone by tone, her poems are by turns political, pointed, intimate, humorous, ordinary, and profound. Here you will find instructive or incriminating dreams, world affairs, human frailties, friends that come and go, wisdom and whimsy. Visually sculpted, rich in mood movement, provocative and pleasurable, these are poems like the moon: illuminating, in transit, stately, and enduring.”—Hoa Nguyen
About the Author:
One of the major poets of the SF Renaissance, Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 in Vallejo, CA. After studying at UC Santa Barbara, she moved to San Francisco in 1957, where she became a member of the circle of poets around Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. In 1960, she joined Gary Snyder in Japan. They then traveled to India where, along with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, they met the Dalai Lama. She returned to California in 1964 and published her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, in 1965. In 1969, she settled in Bolinas, where she continues to reside today. She has published over 30 books of poetry and prose, including The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964 (2015), On Time: Poems 2005-2014 (2015), As Ever: Selected Poems (2002), and About Now: Collected Poems (2007), which won the 2008 Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland.

On Time: Poems 2005-2014

United States

City Lights Publishers

Just Space: Poems 1979-1989

Poetry

Black Sparrow Pr

Up my coast

Floating Island Publications

Poetry. Published in an edition of 1500 copies in 1975 by Big Sky in Bolina, California, ALL THIS EVERY DAY includes one of Kyger's most familiar poems, "September."

All This Every Day

Big Sky

Account of author's travels with Donald Guravich and Diana Middleton-McQuaid to the Yucatan Peninsula to visit the pyramids of antiquity and to acquaint ourselves with its contemporary culture

Phenomenological (Curriculum of the Soul Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Inst of Further Studies

Japan and India Journals 1960-64

Tombouctou Books

Poetry. Kyger's poetry is a daily, hourly, rumination/celebration of human existence, ritual, and physicality, of "how one thing happens after another, seasons, weather, feelings, friends." SOME LIFE exhibits Kyger's keen observations, her biting wit and her diary-like method of composition all while investigating the role of the poet as citizen, artist and connector. "She's one of our hidden treasures -- the poet who really links the Beats, the Spicer Circle, the Bolinas Poets, the New York School, and the Language poets, and the only poet who can be said to do all of the above" -- Ron Silliman. Other titles available through SPD are ALL THIS EVERY DAY (1975) and AGAIN: POEMS 1989-2000 (2001).

Some Life

Post-Apollo Press

Poetry. For decades, Joanne Kyger has played a crucial role in California's poetry scene. Her poetry has been influenced by her studies in Zen Buddhism and her connection to the poets of Black Mountain, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beat Generation. Ron Silliman describes Kyger's poetry as a point of convergence for all "post-avant" literary tendencies the later half of the 20th Century: "You can hear her influence everywhere, from Naropa, to the later generations of the New York School, to Language poetry. Get a fix on Joanne Kyger and a half century of American poetry suddenly comes clearly into focus." This latest collection may serve as the definitive one, highlighting an excellent sampling of her work.

About Now: Collected Poems

National Poetry Foundation

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