She was married for four years to Gary Snyder and has maintained long friendships with Philip Whalen, John Wieners, Allen Ginsberg, Lew Welch, Robert Creeley, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman. She tends to present her aesthetic stance in broad, though emphatic, terms such as
energy, non-linear, line (and
generous line), and
breath, as in these lines from "Throwing a crank in the monkey wrench":
Just resting and dreaming
About planets and people, the primitive, new
woman
Who sits with her breath daily
and these from "The Wonderful Focus of You":
trying to talk in the tremulous
morality of the present
Great Breath, I give you, Great Breath!
Joanne Elizabeth Kyger was born in Vallejo, California, in the fall of 1934. Her father, J. Holmes Kyger, was a career navy officer from Elkton, Virginia. Her mother, Anne Lamont Kyger, came to California in 1918 from Saskatoon, Canada. Due to the exigencies of navy life, the family had many changes of address: from Vallejo to Peking (within the first six weeks of Kyger's life); from Bremerton, Washington, to Upper Darby, Pennsylvania,with sojourns in Pensacola, Florida, and Lake Bluff, Illinois, in between.
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