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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
The daughter of an Irish-English mother and Scottish father (who began as an architect but later chose a career in the Presbyterian ministry), Kathleen Fraser grew up in Oklahoma, Colorado, and California. After considering a major in the visual and plastic arts, Fraser completed her B.A. in English literature at Occidental College, writing her first "very tentative" poems during her last two years there. In 1959, she moved to New York for a career in magazine writing but within a few years began focusing on poetry. Studying in evening workshops with both Stanley Kunitz (1961) and Kenneth Koch (1963), she began publishing poems in The Nation, Poetry, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, and many small-press journals. Soon associated with second-generation Black Mountain and New York school poets, she frequently published in their little magazines. In 1964, Fraser received the YMHA Poetry Center's Discovery Award and the New School's Frank O'Hara Poetry Prize, later followed by an NEA Young Writers Discovery Award. Her son, David Marshall, was born in 1966. In 1969, Fraser was invited by George Starbuck to teach for two years at the Iowa Writers Workshop and followed this with a year as poet-in-residence at Reed College. In the fall of 1972, Fraser returned to California to direct the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where she founded and directed the American Poetry Archives as a part of the Poetry Center project. From 1972 to 1992, Fraser taught in the graduate writing program at SFSU as a professor of creative writing, taking early retirement in 1992 to focus on her own writing and editing.
In 1978 Fraser received an NEA Fellowship and in 1981 a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a mixed-genre reconstruction of the myth of Leda, utilizing Renaissance treatments of the myth as a starting point for her own work. After marrying in Italy in 1984, Fraser and her second husband, the philosopher Arthur Bierman, decided to locate in Rome for the spring and summer of each year and bought an apartment in the Trastevere quarter of the city.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fraser increasingly noted the exclusion of most experimental women poets from anthologies and serious critical treatments. In 1983, therefore, seeking to create a place for women poets writing outside the dicta of both second-wave feminist poetry and the inheritors of male-centered modernism, Fraser founded the groundbreaking journal HOW(ever). In its seven years of publication, HOW(ever) became an important forum for innovative women poets and scholars--Beverly Dahlen, Frances Jaffer, Carolyn Burke, Susan Gevirtz, Susan Howe, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, among many others interested in modernist/postmodernist directions in women's poetry. Reclaiming an obscured tradition of women writers engaged in language experimentation (Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Mina Loy, and Barbara Guest, for example), the women who published their work in HOW(ever) conducted an extensive investigation of the relationship of language to gendered experience. The journal was conceptually process-oriented: poets wrote "working notes" to accompany their poems; scholars and critics wrote informal or partial "studies" (with great difficulty, Fraser notes, because of their academic training). Fraser believed that poets writing about their work process could break through the reading "barrier" that seemed to exist between formally trained scholar-critics and women practitioners of linguistically innovative work. It was Fraser's objective that the theoretical interest in poststructuralist literary problems would carry over into the investigation of current poetic practice and its intentions.
Fraser has published fifteen books, including What I Want (1974), New Shoes (1978), Each Next (1980), Something (even human voices) in the foreground, a lake (1984), Notes preceding trust (1988), when new time folds up (1993), WING (1995), and il cuore: the heart, Selected Poems 1970-1995 (1997). Am audiotape, Even human voices, of Fraser reading from her selected works was produced by Watershed Tapes in 1986. Fraser wrote and narrated the video anthology Women Working in Literature for the American Poetry Archives in 1992. Important critical essays by Fraser that articulate approaches to understanding modernist women poets include "Line. On the Line. Lining Up. Lined with. Between the Lines. Bottom Line" (in The Line in Postmodern Poetry, 1988); "One Hundred and One Chapters of Little Times: The Fiction of Barbara Guest" (in Breaking the Sequence: Experimental Women's Fiction, 1989); and "The Tradition of Marginality" (in Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, 1993).
Recognized in the last two decades as a writer whose poetic, critical, and editorial work has been central to the project of feminist experimental poetry in North America, Fraser has been represented in many anthologies of contemporary poets, among them the Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry (1994) and The Art of Practice: Forty-five Contemporary Poets (1994). Her poems and an essay on visual poetics, "Translating the Unspeakable," are featured in the Talisman anthology Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (1998).
Located formally as well as thematically at the margins of articulation, Fraser's work creates linguistic interchange between text and reader. Such interaction charges the reader to fin in the fragmentary textual subject and recharge it with an embodied subjectivity. The series about which Fraser first speaks in the interview, for example, "Etruscan Pages," was inspired by the sight of fragments of Etruscan material culture (erotic urns hidden away in a museum in Tarquinia, cliff tombs at Norchia). This experience catalyzed a process for her that eventually produced the poem, which the poem's reader-as-archaeologist then must reprocess/restore in reading it. Fraser's poetic project is to "writ[e] over `the erased,'" as she punningly puts it-both rewrite and write over a partially erased text, as well as overwrite (as in an "overwritten" text which, because of that quality of paying attention to its artifice, technically draws attention to itself). Fundamentally engaged in a visual as well as feminist poetics, Fraser's work offers ways to think through how formal strategies interact with lived experience. Her poems encourage us to consider the enactment--or the engendering--of form as experience, as the following passage from a poem for Emily Dickinson illustrates:
her separate personality,
her
father's neutrality
ity
.
equilibrium
(cut her name
out of every
scribble)
hymn himnal now, equal-lateral
.
pronounced with
partially closed
lips
.
pink pearl eraser
erasing her face her
eee face ment
her face meant
.
he cut out
of her, her name
(from "re:searches,"
in Notes preceding trust)
Like Barbara Guest and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Fraser works to reinvent inherited language structures, sometimes playfully, always attentively, listening for "the mysteries of language to come forward and resonate more fully," as she observes in "The Tradition of Marginality" (25).
Since the 1980s, Fraser has read her work and lectured on poetics around the United States and abroad (in 1997 alone, she was scheduled to read and lecture in Italy, England, Japan, and the U.S.). She has a warm, engaging presence, an unstinting generosity with younger poets, and a remarkable capacity for energetic outreach on behalf of postmodern feminism and experimental poetry. When I gave a critical paper on her work at the 1997 Poetry in the Public Sphere Conference at Rutgers University, my personal experience of these aspects of Fraser's character was confirmed by the many similar stories that other poets shared with me after my panel. The interview that follows was conducted on May 26, 1996, at the American Literature Association Conference in San Diego, where Fraser spoke about H.D.'s influence on her work in a talk entitled "Me Empty Page: H.D.'s Invitation to Trust and Mistrust Language." In the interview, Fraser refers to this lecture, which recounts how she has built on H.D.'s notion of the palimpsest (writing on top of partially erased writing) as one important model for her own linguistic innovations.
Q. You spoke this morning about your process while writing"Etruscan Pages," so that is a good poem to start with. I wondered if the process of writing this sequence, which started with something akin to an out-of-body experience, as I understand it, was an unusual one for you.
A. It was definitely a unique and particular sort of experience in my life thus far. I'm not sure that I would have been available to the resonance of the Etruscan necropolises--the culture, in general--that catalyzed the poem without having read H.D. years before and having felt connected to her visionary experience within the context of Egyptian hieroglyph and artifact. Clearly, a larger sensing was available. I did feel as if I had fallen through time. I didn't want to talk, nor talk about that interlude, when we left...
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