encountered some ‘‘wonderfully intelligent poems’’
by Adrienne Rich. But her next important teacher,
in 1963, represented a very different aesthetic: that
was Kenneth Koch, who in turn introduced her to
Frank O’Hara, who led her to Barbara Guest.
Looking back at that time, Fraser has recalled
‘‘shuttl[ing] back and forth’’ between readings by
uptown and downtown poets,
listening to Bishop and Rich uptown, and the
next night reading with my friends Joe Cera-
volo and Hannah Weiner downtown. Each
‘‘family’’ had a poetics that prohibited, via
witty or arrogant dismissal, any interest in the
work of what was seen as a rival or wrong-
minded group. People couldn’t seem to func-
tion in the literary world without asserting and
then defending their own agenda. This territo-
rial attitude meant that poets could neither
mingle with ease nor appreciate each other’s
work.
But, she goes on: ‘‘I didn’t want to have to
choose—FOR one and AGAINST another—in
order to feel comfortable in a particular writing
community. So I didn’t’’ (‘‘Eavan Boland and
Kathleen Fraser’’ 393–94).
For Fraser, that nonchoosing seems to have
been particularly important in relation to
women poets. It enabled Adrienne Rich and
Barbara Guest to function side by side, and not
necessarily in conflict, as her models. Recalling
the beginnings of her desire to locate a female
poetics, Fraser has said, ‘‘For me, the awakening
began out of some combination of Simone de
Beauvoir’s call to consciousness inThe Second
Sex,Adrienne Rich’s grave and alarming poem
‘The Roofwalker,’ and Barbara Guest’s tena-
cious insistence on the primacy of reinventing
language structures in order to catch one’s own
at-oddness with the presumed superiority of the
central mainstream vision’’ (Translating the
Unspeakable31). In this period when women
writers had to wait to be taken up by male
editors or stars who would launch their careers,
Fraser found women generally reluctant to help
each other. Adrienne Rich, Fraser recalls, was an
exception:
She was wonderfully generous to me at that
time. She was eager to talk and to exchange
ideas and, even though her work didn’t provide
a model that I followed in terms of the way I
wanted to write, certainly her generosity as an
older woman to a woman of my generation
made a difference in my ability to sustain a
serious work process. Barbara Guest was also
such a person. I was fortunate to meet these
women in the mid-sixties, just as I was formu-
lating my own poetics. Guest...made me feel
that what I was thinking about poetically mat-
tered, and my love of painting was heightened
and refined by my discussions with her. (‘‘An
Interview’’ 12–13)
In this interview statement from 1996,
Fraser carefully distances herself from Rich’s
mode of writing. Elsewhere, and perhaps some-
what contradictorily, she has dismissed her early
work as ‘‘girlish, Plath-fed lyrics’’ (Perloff 121).
But such retrospective denials and dismissals
seem to me distortions, both because they
obscure the diversity of lineages and examples
feeding Fraser’s sixties poetics, and because they
impose on the sixties divisions that were not
firmly in place until the seventies. Before the
seventies, a woman writer could at least partially
suspend the divisions of the anthology wars in
order to make headway in issues related to gen-
der: she could find liberating and even coura-
geously innovative models in work that gave
direct expression to women’s experienceas well
asin mysteriously oblique, disjunctive, and vis-
ually attuned work like Guests’s. Fraser’s poems
of the mid-sixties themselves suggest that she did
not then choose between then—and I mean not
only the mentoring friendships but also the
poetic examples of the feminist who uses lan-
guage instrumentally and the linguistically inno-
vative one.
The title poem of Fraser’s 1967 collection
Change of Address and Other Poems(published
by Kayak) challenges the reader not to pigeon-
hole Fraser or her writing. The two ways of read-
ing a ‘‘Change of Address’’ suggest a shift in
location (with all the social implications that can
have) and an alteration in one’s form of verbal
communication. The title thereby invites us to
understand the speaker’s refusal to be trapped in
roles and mistaken identities as the poet’s refusal
of neat and fixed aesthetic categories. The zestfulYET THE POEMS REVEAL HOW FRASER’SINVESTMENT IN HETEROSEXUAL EROTICISM BECOMES
A POINT OF RETREAT FROM NEW KINDS OF SELF-
CREATION.’’
Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted