Carolyn Kizer, poet and pioneering feminist, dies at 89

Poet Carolyn Kizer, whose brilliantly taut, frequently sharp-toothed works won her a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the adoration of generations of writers, has died in Sonoma Valley.

A pioneering feminist intrigued by the world and by what happens when humans encounter other humans, Kizer for the past few years endured complications of dementia. She died Thursday at a care home in Sonoma. She was 89.

She was at least a part-time resident of Sonoma since she bought a home there more than 25 years ago with her second husband, architect John Marshall Woodbridge, who died in June. For years, the pair split their time between that home and an apartment in Paris.

Trained and acclaimed also as a translator, teacher and essayist, Kizer the poet was fearless, diligent and exacting.

“I write all over the house,” she told a Press Democrat reporter in 1996. She admitted to being a “compulsive reviser,” possibly putting a poem through 40 drafts.

“Writing poetry is an intensely physical activity,” she said. “You do it with all the body.”

One of her more physical works, “The Intruder,” explored her mother’s response to the “fluttering, bleeding bat” the cat dragged in. The poem concludes:

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor

Remained, of all my mother’s tender, wounding passion

For a whole wild, lost, betrayed, and secret life

Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,

Whose denizens can turn upon the world

With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw,

To sting or soil benevolence, alien

As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot.

She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap,

She washed and washed the pity from her hands.

For decades, Kizer generously encouraged and critiqued many yearning writers, among them Petaluma’s Terry Ehret, a former Sonoma County poet laureate.

“She was described to me as the Mae West of poetry. That was a good description,” said Ehret, who teaches creative writing at The Sitting Room community library in Penngrove and with her students explored a piece by Kizer just days before the poet’s death.

“She had a larger-than-life presence and a great sense of humor,” Ehret said. “But you had to watch out, lest you be the object of those darts!”

Ehret met her mentor in the mid-1980s at a couple of the writing conferences that Kizer, then a resident of Berkeley, directed throughout the Bay Area. Several years later, Ehret was shocked to receive a letter from Kizer. The Petaluman had been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Kizer was a judge. Struck by Ehret’s writing and potential, Kizer invited her to come to Sonoma for a visit and a talk.

Ehret recalls, “I was so terrified at the idea of meeting Carolyn Kizer that I didn’t take her up on her offer.” The two of them eventually became friends anyway, and Ehret went several times to Kizer and Woodbridge’s beautifully restored Sonoma farmhouse for readings and other literary gatherings.

“They had the most amazing bookshelves, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves,” Ehret said. “John converted the water tower to a writing studio for Carolyn.”

The Petaluman lavishes credit on Kizer for help launching her writing career, which now entails four books of poetry. Ehret said Kizer was extraordinarily important to other women writers, “and in particular to women who in the 1950s and 1960s were finding their way to poetry with a new kind of voice.

“She also was a great champion of writing from one’s experience, and writing with utter honesty and clarity,” Ehret said.

Carolyn Ashley Kizer grew up in Spokane, Wash. She recalled to the Paris Review in 2000, “I began writing poems when I was about 8, 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 on the sofa struggling with asthma.”

Kizer earned degrees at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia and at the University of Washington, where she was deeply influenced while studying poetry under Theodore Roethke. In 1959, she co-founded and made an acclaimed journal of Poetry Northwest, in Seattle.

She published her first of eight collections of poetry, “The Ungrateful Garden,” in 1961. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Yin: New Poems” in 1984. Her most recent book, “Cool, Calm, and Collected,” came out in 2000.

Kizer is survived by daughters Ashley Bullitt of Seattle and Jill Bullitt of Hudson, N.Y.; son Fred Nemo of Portland, Ore.; stepson Larry Woodbridge of Brooklyn, N.Y.; stepdaughter Pamela Wood-ridge of Berkeley; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Kizer began exhibiting signs of dementia only a few years ago. This past spring, Annie Finch, co-editor of the 2001 book, “Carolyn Kizer: Perspectives on Her Life and Work,” published a story recalling a visit she’d paid to the poet in Sonoma.

Finch went with Santa Rosa’s Katherine Hastings, current Sonoma County Poet Laureate and host of KRCB radio’s “WordTemple” poetry show, and Joyce Jenkins, editor of the Bay Area’s Poetry Flash literary review and calendar.

Finch wrote on poetryfoundation.org that Kizer didn’t speak during the visit at the assisted-living home. But when she, Finch, read from Kizer’s extended poem, “Pro Femina,” Kizer’s face lit up “and it seemed apparent that she was following every word, nodding proudly at particularly good moments, laughing with her eyes at the funniest parts.”

As Finch and other two visitors stood at the door to leave, Kizer had still not spoken a word. Finch wrote:

“At that moment, as I gave Carolyn my last hug, it happened - in a voice I will never forget. She looked right into my eyes, and she spoke.

“And then she repeated the same words to the others. They were her last words to each of us, to all of us:

“‘Thank you,’ she said.”