As Ever

 

As Ever is Joanne Kyger's latest book of poetry. It is edited by Michael Rothenberg, who says, "Joanne's poetry is poetry with an attitude. Immediate, playful, collogquial, and instructional. She lets you know where it's at and how to do it, and when. Now." David Meltzer wrote the introduction. The book is published by Penguin Poets. ISBN: 0-14-200112-0.

Joanne Kyger has played a vital role in the American poetry scene for more than four decades, and has been associated with nearly every innovative poetry tendency during that time, from the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats to the postmodern movements of today. This definitive collection of her work reveals her as one of the major experimenters, hybridizers, and visionaries of poetry. Kyger is very much a poet of place, with a truly strong voice-delicate, graceful, and never wasteful; her poems explore themes of friendship, love, community, and morality, and draw on Native American sources as well as the path of Buddhist religion and philosophy. Kyger's love for poetry manifests itself in a grander scheme of consciousness-expansion and lesson, but always in the realm of every day. Edited with a foreword by Michael Rothenberg, and with an introduction by poet David Meltzer, this book is a marvelous overview of a wonderfully challenging and important poet.

"Joanne Kyger's poems: musing, sharp-edged, generous. Striking how she can take the most ordinary moment-to-moment-and ground it in depths we all share; then move out to the mystical and devotional and resolve in the magically plain. A superb poetic sensibility effortlessly playing like the shadows passing on a far mountain range: and yet so intimate!"
—Gary Snyder

"Joanne Kyger's poetry is a continuous demonstration of true FREEDOM, on all levels of the world's phenomenal and spiritual realms. Her poems, of any that I know, come the closest to being actual beings-beings endowed with a genuine materiality of thought, feeling, language and humor. They make one glad to be alive."
—Anselm Hollo

"If existence is just what happens, can poetry rise to the occasion? Joanne Kyger's poetry is of existence as it happens, moving within earshot, and close-up, under her sharply critical, wildly affectionate glance. It is Kyger's peculiar sorcery to force the issue: a wave of her wand brings actuality into focus, shimmering in syllables newly familiar, momentous, and true."
—Bill Berkson

"Joanne Kyger's great body of poetry continues to amaze . . . One of the most needed books in American poetry today."
—Michael McClure

 

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