Kizer Quotes

I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I've been enormously fortunate. People say, 'How do you feel about your reputation?' My real belief is that I have exactly the reputation I deserve ... on the whole, I feel comfortable with myself. ~ Carolyn Kizer

Love is the greatest act of faith. ~ Amber Kizer

Poets are interested mostly in death and commas. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back. ~ Carolyn Kizer

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem! ~ Carolyn Kizer

It's hard to take sex ed seriously when the teachers haven't even wiggled their stuff in this millennium. ~ Amber Kizer

Food of Love
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II

I'm going to murder you with love;
I'm going to suffocate you with embraces;
I'm going to hug you, bone by bone,
Till you're dead all over.
Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.

You will become my personal Sahara;
I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow
Drain you remaining brackish well.
With my female blade I'll carve my name
In your most aspiring palm
Before I chop it down.
Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole.

But in the total desert you become
You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,
Opulent mirage!
Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen.
Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.

So you will summon each dry grain of sand
And move towards me in undulating dunes
Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine:
A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;
Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes
Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,
Surprising life! And I will be that green.

When you are fed and watered, flourishing
With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire,
Till you are resurrected field in bloom,
I will devour you, my natural food,
My host, my final supper on the earth,
And you'll begin to die again. ~ Carolyn Kizer

What good is a quilt if it's unused? The same as a life unused. They're meant to be wrung out and frayed around the edges. That's the way of things. Always has been. Always will be. ~ Amber Kizer

Death is what makes life possible. It's the balance, Meridian. There always has to be balance. ~ Amber Kizer

Smoked sausage and a jolly tupping. Ale and folly. Fickle bosoms and bar fights. That is the sum of experiences my souls gathered from their lives. Why do I attract all the unsophisticated fancy men? For once could one love the opera and his mother?
- Lucinda Myer, b. 1702-d. 1808 ~ Amber Kizer

I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I began writing poems when I was about eight, 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 lying on the sofa struggling with asthma. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I'm eclipsed by my role in the world ~ Amber Kizer

Bitch"

Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don't start growling.
He isn't a trespasser anymore,
Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, "Nice to see you,"
As the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn't an enemy now,
Where are your manners, I say, as I say,
"How are the children? They must be growing up."
At a kind word from him, a look like the old days,
The bitch changes her tone; she begins to whimper.
She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe.
Down, girl! Keep your distance
Or I'll give you a taste of the choke-chain.
"Fine, I'm just fine," I tell him.
She slobbers and grovels.
After all, I am her mistress. She is basically loyal.
It's just that she remembers how she came running
Each evening, when she heard his step;
How she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly
Though he was absorbed in his paper;
Or, bored with her devotion, ordered her to the kitchen
Until he was ready to play.
But the small careless kindnesses
When he'd had a good day, or a couple of drinks,
Come back to her now, seem more important
Than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal.
"It's nice to know you are doing so well," I say.
He couldn't have taken you with him;
You were too demonstrative, too clumsy,
Not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends.
"Give my ~ Carolyn Kizer

Poets are interested primarily in death and commas. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano. ~ Carolyn Kizer

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see - a faculty that usually isn't highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing. ~ Carolyn Kizer

If you live long enough, you learn time is an illusion created by men who fear death. The clocks and watches worshipped by those who deny the inevitable. There is power in acknowledging we are not the ones in control. ~ Amber Kizer

Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives. ~ Carolyn Kizer

For all their weirdness, I LOVE the penis people. I don't understand them. I can't imagine I'll ever learn their language of grunting and scratching, but I'm going to try. If I have to devote my life to learning, I will do it. I can't explain the compulsion that is me thinking about Stephen now. Or just watching a boy walk by and wondering what is going on inside his head. To have him want to play with my hair and take me exciting places. To touch his amazingly fabulous butt and not be arrested for assault.
Don't they have a distinct smell? When do they start producing that spicy, manly, different-from-me scent? I don't mean the sweaty, take-a-shower odor, but the yummy soap and a hint of cologne. The kind of scent that makes me want to inhale in their general vicinity just because I can.
I get fluttery and gooey and cease to function at higher levels. Like I shut down except for feeling things; like the hot rays of Stephen's manliness and the solid rock of femur and muscle under his denim cargo pants. ~ Amber Kizer

You're not from around here, are you? Can't be. Why would we name it I-YOU-POO-Y? Really? Say the letters. I-U-P-U-I. ~ Amber Kizer

from "Semele Recycled"

But then your great voice rang out under the skies
my name!-- and all those private names
for the parts and places that had loved you best.
And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.
The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,
and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,
and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,
and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,
set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"
that our two bodies met like a thunderclap
in midday-- right at the corner of that wretched field
with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.
We fell in a heap on the compost heap
and all our loving parts made love at once,
while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes
and then went decently about their business.

And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the river
and are sweet and wholesome once more.
We kneel side by side in the sand;
we worship each other in whispers.
But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,
the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,
and passion, its bloody labor,
its birth and rebirth and decay. ~ Carolyn Kizer

Love conquers nothing. Love provides the motivation; the person must do the rest with their own hands, heart, and feet. ~ Amber Kizer

Be the cockroach ~ Amber Kizer

She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good. ~ Carolyn Kizer

You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject. ~ Carolyn Kizer