and attitudes, the mindset encapsulated and
embodied in the grand English tradition, was a
serious inhibition in the development of her own
poetic, imposing as it did a mellifluous sonorous
continuity on a life that she felt, as a woman, to
be essentially discontinuous, fragmented, margi-
nalized, and multiple. Her need to escape a
grand tradition to which she felt strongly
attracted came to constitute in complex ways a
form of almost self-inflicted intimidation, which
influenced her decision to major in philosophy
when she entered Occidental College in Los
Angeles as a sophomore in 1954.
Yet in her senior year Fraser switched to an
English literature major, thereby postponing grad-
uation until January 1959. This change was partly
a result of what she learned in a humanities/clas-
sics two-year, required course, where she read
Herman Melville and Walt Whitman as well as
standard English classics, but it was mainly the
result of browsing in the library or bookstores—
where she discovered works such as Virginia
Woolf’sThe Waves(1931). Through intense col-
lege friendships she was introduced to the work of
writers such as E. E. Cummings, James Joyce, and
William Carlos Williams, and she began scribbling
poetry[....] For her birthday her college friends
joined together to give her T. S. Eliot’sCollected
Poems(1936), Williams’sJourney to Love(1955),
and Cummings’si: six nonlectures(1953)—works
that, along with the writings of Dylan Thomas,
became models for her early verse. Cummings was
especially attractive because his radical breaking
of normative syntax and grammar spoke directly
[to Fraser’s internal struggle]. This struggle within
and against her education came to inform Fraser’s
whole career as a writer, a writing life perpetually
venturing into what she called, inHOW(ever)in
1982, ‘‘the tentative regions of the untried.’’
On graduating from college in 1959 Fraser
left an increasingly incompatible southern Cal-
ifornia for New York City, where she began
work writing copy for the fashion magazine
Mademoiselle. By this time committed to a life
of writing poetry, she felt she knew virtually
nothing of the contemporary writing scene: at
college she had never in class been introduced to
the work of any living writers (other than per-
haps William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway),
though she had attended a reading at Occidental
by Robert Lowell. She had never read or even
come across such major women modernists as
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Marianne Moore, or
Gertrude Stein. Hungry for news, she found
herself excited by everything she read—Pablo
Neruda, Ce ́sar Vallejo, Paul Ce ́lan, Giuseppe
Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale—but with no
basis for comparison. She found herself perpet-
ually learning, unlearning, and then learning to
do things differently.... It was some years before
she could evolve a poetic philosophy and tech-
nique commensurate with her experience, but
her hunger for writing news was such that
almost immediately on her arrival in New
York she took a poetry course offered by poet
Stanley Kunitz at the Ninety-second Street
Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA),
enrolling in his workshop in the fall of 1959
and again in the following semester. Fraser was
‘‘thrilled,’’ she would later say, by Kunitz’s
‘‘Yeatsian language and passionate metaphysi-
cal vision,’’ and she learned through him to
admire the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Kunitz, a
generous and sympathetic teacher, was at this
time still strongly traditionalist in his own verse,
which was strictly formal in structure and lofty
in theme. (It was only in the 1960s, for instance,
that Kunitz began some of his lines with lower-
case letters.) ‘‘A high style,’’ he said, ‘‘wants to be
fed exclusively on high sentiments.’’ Such an
approach to poetry could not satisfy for long
someone of Fraser’s immediacy and passion.
For by instructing Fraser to cast herself and
her experience as representative—and to think
of her condition as writer as both universal and
transcendent, unaffected by the world, free of
such quotidian distractions as race or gender—
Kunitz made an icon of the lyric poetic self,
elevating it to a position superior to that of the
reader by installing its own power as seer, trans-
former, and possessor of meaning. In thus sub-
ordinating the reader to the role of witness
seeking to ‘‘understand’’ the poem, rather than
participant in the construction of meaning, it
perpetuated the very condition Fraser had
found so crippling as a student in school.
In Kunitz’s workshop Fraser met the young
poet Jack Marshall. In 1960 he became her first
husband. Their conversations opened up for
Fraser the world of poetry and painting: he took
her to see the work of Willem de Kooning, Franz
Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Sam Francis.... She
began to meet other New York writers—having
been drawn almost from her arrival in New York
to Greenwich Village and to the ‘‘downtown’’
poets, including Robert Kelly, Paul Blackburn,
Jerome Rothenberg, Armand Schwerner, CarolPoem in Which My Legs Are Accepted