Beginning as a poet of the second generation San Francisco renaissance, Joanne Kyger first appeared on the literary scene during the later days of the Beat emergence. Her artistic dues were paid mainly within the context of other, more strictly local, movements; in particular, with the groups clustered around Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, the then senior poets of the town. Like most of that contingent, Kyger left San Francisco by the late 1960s for other places along the Pacific coast and elsewhere. She has continued into mastery of an independent, personal kind of poetry--by turns hermetic, occasional, devotional, and narrative--drawing on her own logical progression of sources. Her connection with Beat writers, aside from matters of plain friendship, is grounded on mutual understandings of tradition and sources, poetic and philosophical. Among modern predecessors, she acknowledges William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot as the main early influences on her poetry, which has likewise been informed by attention to Buddhist scriptures, American Indian lore, psychedelics, practices of "New-Age" communities, totemism, shamanism, and so on.
