Yin
by Carolyn Kizer
Summary
Yin gathers poems that range across mythology, feminist argument, and personal history, holding together a book that refuses to settle into any single mode. Carolyn Kizer reworks classical myth directly in poems such as "Semele Recycled," which takes the story of a woman destroyed by a god's full presence and turns it into something closer to a warning about what desire actually costs a woman who is honest about wanting it. Elsewhere the book gathers pieces from her long running sequence "Pro Femina," a series that argues, often with open anger, about what it costs a woman to write and be taken seriously while a male dominated literary establishment decides what counts as serious work.
Kizer moves easily between registers, urbane and conversational in one poem, formally exacting in the next, and she draws on her own fluency in Chinese literature, developed through years of study and translation, to bring classical Chinese and Japanese forms into conversation with contemporary American subjects. The book also turns directly autobiographical at points, drawing on her own two marriages and her decades inside American literary institutions, material she treats with the same unsparing honesty she brings to myth.
Reading Yin means following a poet who refuses to keep her intelligence and her anger in separate poems, willing to be satirical in one breath and elegiac in the next. It suits a reader drawn to poetry that argues as much as it observes, particularly a reader interested in how a woman's anger at a literary world built by and for men can become, in the right hands, some of that world's most durable poetry.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Carolyn Kizer the 1985 Prize for Poetry for Yin, choosing it over finalists Robert Duncan's Ground Work and Charles Wright's The Other Side of the River. Kizer had already shaped American poetry from outside her own writing: in 1966 she became the first director of Literary Programs at the newly created National Endowment for the Arts, resigning in 1970 after the Nixon administration removed NEA chairman Roger Stevens.
Kizer had studied comparative mythology at Sarah Lawrence College under Joseph Campbell before the poet Theodore Roethke encouraged her, in 1954, to commit herself to writing. Later honors confirmed the standing Yin had helped secure, including the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. She died in 2014.