Josephine Miles and Carolyn Kizer: October 18, 1973

The Poetry Center presents Josephine Miles and Carolyn Kizer, reading their poems at San Francisco State University. Miles, scholar and teacher of poetry and poets at U.C. Berkeley already for several decades (from 1940, as noted in the introduction), opens with a comic poem that she says is her one contribution to "women's poetry" per se. She reads from Kinds of Affection (Wesleyan, 1967) among other work. Kizer opens with a dedication to "my dear friend and colleague" Nicanor Parra, noting her fear that he may not have survived the September 11 military coup d'état, that toppled Salvador Allende's government in Chile, and its aftermath. (For more regarding poets' responses to those events, cf. Ishmael Reed two weeks earlier reading for The Poetry Center.) Kizer then reads from Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (Doubleday, 1971). Kathleen Fraser provides the introductions for both poets, including remarks on the feminist movement and on women poets' work being recognized more widely.

Note: the recording ends abruptly before Kizer's reading is finished.