In her first poetry collection, joanne kyger revisits and revises Homeric epic myth, adding layers of
personal, reflective imagery and references. The
backdrop to the composition of her poems gives a
snapshot of the West Coast Beat scene. Arriving at
age 22 in San Francisco in 1957, Kyger was quickly
swept up into the North Beach arts milieu, meeting poets and attending readings at the numerous
lively venues that were popularized by members of
the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Writers visited from Greenwich Village, and there was an influx of students who had previously studied at the
experimental Black Mountain College in North
Carolina.
Kyger began to attend the poetry circle that
grouped around Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan,
and it was there, on February 23, 1958, that she
first read material that would become part of The
Tapestry and the Web, the work that Kyger has identified as her breakthrough in establishing her own
poetic “voice.” Duncan later described the scene:
Kyger, in her habitual stance of kneeling and holding the text before her, intensely focused on her
words, reads to the mostly male assemblage “The
Maze,” a poem about a woman who was driven
mad by expectations of passive fidelity. The response, said Duncan, was an immediate “furore”
as Kyger’s passionate and iconoclastic vision registered with the usually highly critical group.
Drawing on Homer’s tale, Kyger creates a dynamic Penelope who was more fueled by eros than
the nobly stoic spouse of Homer’s epic; the latter
guards her wifely virtue and nightly unweaves her
daily tapestry work. Kyger reevaluates the passivity of
Penelope’s patience for Odysseus, asking in the poem
“Pan as the Son of Penelope,” “Just HOW / solitary
was her wait?” Kyger portrays Penelope as wily and
in control, and he essays new versions of Penelope’s
long wait for the return of her husband, imagining
more and more daring accounts: Penelope as a cheating wife; Penelope giving birth to a son fathered by
all the suitors; Penelope slowly going mad. Through
the central metaphor of dreaming and weaving,
Kyger explores burgeoning female creativity. The
poems of The Tapestry and The Web grow from the
centering mythic narratives, which, in Kyger’s chatty,
colloquial, Beat-influenced idiom, are grounded in
personal concerns and a sense of immediacy.
Critic and chronicler of the San Francisco
Poetry Renaissance Michael Davidson has argued
that in some ways Kyger is herself analogous to Penelope, citing her position as a singular female in
a largely male artistic enclave, surrounded by suitors/male writers whom she “enchants” with her poetry. Certainly there is something both playful and
subversive in Kyger’s challenge to Homeric and
patriarchal authority. Influences in Kyger’s work
include both the late modernism of Duncan and
the nature-oriented, Zen-inflected work of gary
snyder (Kyger’s husband from 1960 to 1964 whom
she met in 1958).
Ultimately it is the personal narrative in
Kyger’s work, an impulsive and exhilarating voice,
that bridges her navigation of these various influences. Kyger’s achievement in The Tapestry and
The Web is the creation of a book-length, cohesive
work that is autobiographical, laconic, colloquial,
grounded in classical mythology, and yet personal.
Bibliography
Davidson, Michael. “Appropriations: Women and the
San Francisco Renaissance.” In The San Francisco
Poetry Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Midcentury. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989, 172–199.
Duncan, Robert. As Testimony: The Poem & The Scene.
San Francisco: White Rabbit, 1964.
Friedman, Amy L. “Joanne Kyger, Beat Generation Poet:
‘a porcupine traveling at the speed of light.’” In Reconstructing The Beats, edited by Jennie Skerl, 73–
88. New York: Palgrave, 2004.
Amy L. Friedman