Joanne Kyger

Joanne Kyger

(1934–)

(Full name Joanne Elizabeth Kyger) American poet and travel writer.

Kyger was an important figure in San Francisco poetry circles in the late 1950s. However, like many women writers of the Beat Generation, she was as well known for her association with such leading male poets as Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan as she was for her own work. Her 1965 collection The Tapestry and the Web includes poems written during her time with Spicer and Duncan, and The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964 (1981) chronicles the years she spent in Japan while married to the poet Gary Snyder and the couple’s travels to India with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Kyger continued to write after the end of the Beat era, and she is a respected figure of the Language Poetry school. Kyger is a Buddhist, and her poetry displays a strong interest in Zen and Native American mythology.

Biographical Information

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 in Vallejo, California. Her father was a naval officer, and their family lived in China and in various cities across the United States before settling in Santa Barbara when Kyger was fourteen.

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