videotape recordings by contemporary poets
in North America), and founding editor of
HOW(ever)(1983-1991), a much-imitated radi-
cal journal of women’s innovative poetry,
Kathleen Fraser has had an important influence
on American poetry and poetics for a quarter
century. That her work nevertheless remains lit-
tle recognized is at least in part a direct result of
her own decision, after the publication ofNew
Shoesby Harper and Row in 1978, to withhold
all her future work from major New York trade
publishing companies in favor of little magazines
and small private presses. Her earliest work
appeared in such well-established and presti-
gious journals asPoetry(Chicago),The New
Yorker,The Hudson Review,The Nation,and
Mademoiselle. Since the mid 1970s, however,
Fraser has chosen to publish almost exclusively
in little magazines such as TemblorHambone-
ConjunctionsSulfur, andAvec.
Nevertheless, Fraser’s poetic output shows
remarkable consistency. Though she seems in
the early years to have concentrated on and
excelled at writing the ‘‘well-made’’ expressionist
lyrical poem, grounded in clearly identifiable
personal experience, and in her later years to
show clear and even compelling affinities with
the work of the language writers, deliberately
foregrounding language as material object,
criticizing habits of meaning by defamiliarizing
customary language patterns, her work has,
throughout its shift from a publishing career to
a writing career, been marked by a delight in
rhetorical forms and strategies and what one
reviewer, Peter Scheldahl, has called ‘‘an eager
and uncomplicated impulse toward love and
friendship.’’ Fraser’s work is notable for the
immediacy and directness of both the sensual
and the emotional, while avoiding the pitfalls
of display to which confessional poetry is so
prone. At heart, it is a poetry of exploration
and of zest. It is remarkably accessible yet by
no means conventional.
The eldest of four children (one boy, three
girls), Kathleen Joy Fraser was born in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, on 22 March 1935 to Marjorie Joy
(Axtell) Fraser and James Ian Fraser II. One
year after beginning his practice as an architect,
her father—a graduate of the University of
Tulsa School of Architecture—reached the deci-
sion to change professions and entered the
Union Theological Seminary in Chicago to pre-
pare for the Presbyterian ministry, a calling
which he followed until his death from a head-
on car crash in 1966. In several essays Fraser
recalls with affection her father’s inveterate
habit of reciting nonsense verse and singing
silly songs—a practice that, coupled with his
highly vocal love for the rhetorical orotundity
of the King James Bible, would have a lasting
and in some respects problematic effect on her
poetry. After a childhood in which she spent
three years (from grades six through nine) in
the high mountains of Glenwood Springs, Colo-
rado, and finally settled in Covina, California,
where she lived until graduating from high
school, Fraser knew by heart ‘‘great chunks’’ of
the Bible, as well as a great deal of English non-
sense verse. She also acquired from her father an
irrepressible delight in the sounds of words.
...perhaps, one can see the seeds of Fraser’s
lifelong struggle—a struggle she came to feel was
shared by many women, whether writers or not—
against her education. By the time she reached
high school Fraser found herself essentially well
trained to fear poetry. Alienated by its refusal to
yield meanings other than those few handed
down by her teachers, Fraser had, like countless
others, learned not to take classes that fore-
grounded poetry[....]
Much later, teaching creative writing at San
Francisco State in the 1970s, Fraser came to
believe that this particular problem of meaning
is gender related. As she observed in the intro-
duction to her 1984 anthology of student writ-
ing,Feminist Poetics: ‘‘there is an expectation in
[women students themselves] of failure, of not
doing it right and never being quite sure they
understand what right means, when they’ve
been told that the materials, feelings and struc-
tures of many of their poems are inappropriate
to the professional world of poetry.’’ In the case
of her own development as a poet, Fraser found
that the persistence of the rhythms and soundsSUCH WRITING IS MARKED BY OVERT RISK-
TAKING, BY AN ACUTELY PAINFUL HONESTY OF REVE-
LATION AND DETAIL OF DIALOGUE AND RESPONSE, OF
THOUGHT AND DESIRE, OF ANGER AND DELIGHT.’’Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted