In the following excerpt, House discusses the various stages of Kizer's poetry career.

Kizer's literary activities include founding Poetry Northwest, a journal she edited from its beginning in 1959 until 1965; serving as a U.S. State Department specialist in Pakistan during 1964 and 1965; and directing literary programs for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1966 to 1970. She has also been poet-in-residence at the university of North Carolina (1970-1974); Hurst Professor at Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri (1971); acting director of the graduate writing program at Columbia University (1972); a lecturer at Barnard College in New York (1972); McGuffey Lecturer and poet-in-residence at Ohio University (1975); and a professor of poetry in the Iowa Writers Workshop (1976). In 1985 she was a senior fellow in humanities at Princeton University. At the end of "The Stories of My Life," an autobiographical section of Proses, Kizer confides the having experiences "war, love, marriage, separation, loneliness, children, the death...