Joanne Kyger and the Narrative of Every Day

[para. 1]: "The force of the past frequently gets morphed to our uses of it. How difficult it is to see what took place as event, or what continues in words to inhabit the force of actual conditions. Fortunately, the very nature of Joanne Kyger’s work, tracking time as it does through many shifting perspectives, demands intimate attention and requires that it be observed according to its own terms. While her poetry touches on several mid-century movements of writing that include the Spicer Circle, the San Francisco Renaissance, The Beats, and Black Mountain traditions, her work remains exemplary for an approach to narrative practiced with enthusiasm by New Americans during the 1960s and ‘70s. Her poetry attends place and memory through the transformative yet immaterial entity of the self, revealing a body of feeling that is grounded to the experience of every day as a referential space to process private perceptions, transforming individual insight into communal reflection and speculation. The intimate notations of her poems resist easy critical assimilation and reductions to mere “meaning.” Instead, Kyger demands a sharpening of the reader’s attention to words and how they compose a world."