Carolyn Kizer Quotes

“What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.”

— Carolyn Kizer

“You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.”

— Carolyn Kizer

“Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.”

— 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

“Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,
In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
[ ... ]
So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,
All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!
Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?”

— Carolyn Kizer

We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.

— Carolyn Kizer

“As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.”

— Carolyn Kizer

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

— Carolyn Kizer

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

— Carolyn Kizer

“I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo.”

— Carolyn Kizer

No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.

— 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 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 tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife.

— 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

I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.

— 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

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

— Carolyn Kizer

“He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.”

— Carolyn Kizer

“A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust,”

— 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

“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

“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

“Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.”

— Carolyn Kizer