Kizer as an Anthologist

by Annie Finch

Published in Poetry International, 1999

Review of: 100 Great Poems by Women, ed. Carolyn Kizer. Ecco Press, 1995. 184 pp. $15 paper.

It is surprising that Carolyn Kizer's little book called 100 Great Poems by Women has been more or less overlooked, because it is a milestone. At a time when anthologies are published by the hundreds, this one is a truly important collection, edited with brilliance by a poet who must command our respect. It is that very rare thing, a true poet's anthology. And even more memorably, at a time when works by women are reprinted most often out of a sense of historical curiosity, this captivating grouping of an eclectic range of women's poems has been organized solely in the name of poetry.

In the tradition of the famous anthologies edited by Pound and Auden, 100 Great Poems by Women is edited by a talented, mature poet whose acute native ear for language has been exquisitely trained. As Richard Wilbur puts it on the jacket, "Carolyn Kizer is too fine a poet to pick any poems which are other than fine." Even the couple of poems for which Kizer, characteristically wry, chooses to apologize in her foreword to the book ("a poem so exquisitely awful that it can never be erased from the mind . . .") turn out to be worth reading. Kizer claims that the editing of this book drew most of all "on the repository of memory: of names, of phrases, of stanzas stored over a lifetime," and the finished product does seem a labor of love, edited with the flair and naturalness that only a long lifetime devoted to poetry provides.

Kizer has made a conscious decision to showcase poems on"gender-neutral" topics: "this anthology is bent on showing what women can write about besides romance and domesticity." This was probably a wise decision, since most women's poetry anthologies, even the determinedly feminist No More Masks, contain a preponderence of domestic poems. Among Kizer's hundred are poems reflecting her own taste for satire and political verse, such as Anne Finch's wonderful "Trail All Your Pikes" and Sarah Cleghorn's famous and bitter quatrain "The golf links lie so near the mill / That almost every day / The laboring children can look out / And see the men at play"; poems that, like some of Kizer's finest, celebrate friendships between women (my favorite is by Katherine Philips, a.k.a. "the matchless Orinda"); and a steady stream of excellent poems that protest women's social and political position over the centuries. Kizer's choices reflect a refreshing range of aesthetics, from Gertrude Stein to Anne Bradstreet, and while she is not as discriminating in her choice of contemporary verse as in her choice of verse by dead poets (what anthologist ever is?), her anthology certainly contains enough great poems to earn its title.

The book's chief delight for me lies in its juxtaposition of familiar old chestnuts, including Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus," Felicia Homans' "Stately Homes of England," and Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," with surprising gems from much obscurer writers, many of them anonymous or pseudonymous. After decades of reading and loving women's poetry, I can honestly say that reading through this anthology gave me for the first time the palpable sense of how many, many, many women have written poems before me. Without the historical apparatus and biographies that usually weigh down such anthologies, without any ideological burden or self-consciousness, this little anthology-the first truly literary poet's anthology to focus on women's poetry-ushers women's poetry out of its pedestalled corner and into the main literary arena. No one is better qualified to have bestowed this gift than Carolyn Kizer.

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch