Berge, and Diane Wakoski; to Black Mountain
writers such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan,
Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson; and to the
New York School poets Frank O’Hara, Kenward
Elmslie, Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, and espe-
cially Barbara Guest. Such avant-garde writers
on the margin were, whether they knew it or
not, Fraser’s teachers. In her mind they made up
her literary family.
During this same period she came across the
work of Wallace Stevens, hearing two young
men recite his work at a party in Greenwich
Village. As she recounts the story in ‘‘Things
that do not exist without words,’’ she was trans-
ported into an ‘‘untranslatable elation.’’ The next
day she bought his poems, which she read,
‘‘transfixed,’’ every day in the office at lunch
hour. For Fraser, Stevens was the great ‘‘unloos-
ener’’[....] Stevens thus became the first of several
figures who drew Fraser away from poetry as she
had learned it in school, who drew her back
toward the poetry of her childhood.
Fraser’s reading fed into her increasing dis-
satisfaction with her own writing situation and
thus drew her in the summer of 1964 to enroll in
Daisy Alden’s two-week course at Wagner Col-
lege. Because Alden was ill, Kenneth Koch
taught the course instead. Koch, famously imag-
inative and strong-minded as a teacher, gave silly
nonsense-writing assignments that restored to
Fraser the playful attitude toward poetic lan-
guage she had acquired from her father in her
childhood. Koch’s hostility in class toward any
sign of high seriousness or emotional vulnerabil-
ity, whether in the writing or in the individual,
and his disdain for sentimental poetic retreads
were crucial for Fraser at this stage in her career,
when she felt in need of liberation from older
forms and inhibitions. Soon after, through
Frank O’Hara, Fraser met Barbara Guest,
whose intensely disciplined attention to the
accuracy of her language [...] would have a per-
vasive and lasting effect. Guest’s sense of lan-
guage as a prison, her sense that language is
inadequate to the writing event itself, had its
kinship with the work of the New York painters
about whom she wrote so brilliantly.
During these years Stevens and Guest
became Fraser’s great exemplars and inspira-
tions; finally, hearing George Oppen read his
work early in 1967 firmly secured her sense of
her own difference from the mainstream. Strik-
ing Fraser as wholly without posture, modest yet
severe in its unflinching attention to detail and
nuance, Oppen’s work appealed to her as a new
kind of attentiveness, speaking to some
neglected level of gravity. Oppen joined Stevens
and Guest as prime constituents of Fraser’s writ-
ing life. Fraser’s personal life, meanwhile, had
not been without its troubles. In 1965 her father
was killed in a head-on car crash. Later, in 1969,
her sister Mary died. A mezzo-soprano, she too
appears in Fraser’s writings. Christmas of 1966
saw the birth of her son, David, on 26 December.
The New York neighborhood in which Fraser
lived was becoming increasingly the site of drug
trafficking and consumption; in September 1967
she and Marshall returned home from walking
their son to find their apartment completely
trashed and everything portable (including type-
writers, stereo, and tape recorder) stolen. Within
the week they left for San Francisco, with one
month’s rent and few prospects.
ThemovetoSanFranciscoprovedextremely
fortunate. George and Mary Oppen became close
friends, George reading (and advising her about)
her poems. As a writer Fraser found the atmos-
phere of the Bay Area congenial, contrasting
sharply with the flash and dazzle of writing per-
formance characteristic of so many New York
poets. Fraser’s first book,Change of Address &
Other Poems(1966), had already been published
in San Francisco by George Hitchcock’s Kayak
Press; in 1968 the prestigious publishing house
Atheneum brought outStilts, Somersaults, and
Headstands, a book of poems for children. Much
of the energy for this book no doubt came from
Fraser’s work caring for her son, but the childlike
directness of the language and the simplicity of the
sound patterns so prominent in these verses for
children carry over into Fraser’s subsequent work,
most directly in the poems gathered inIn Defiance
of the Rains(1969), again published by Hitchcock.
The title of Fraser’s first book,Change of
Address, suggests the extent to which her poetry
is drawn directly from her immediate daily expe-
rience in a physical world. The poems themselves,
often centering on an ‘‘I’’ or a readily imaginable
‘‘you,’’ investigate different relations in and of
speech and exploit some of the puns implicit in
the title. The poems inIn Defiance of the Rains
explore line breaks, punctuation, and sentence
pattern in their construction of sound[....]
Some of the poems play with context and
reader expectation, at the same time punning the
alphabet, as in the epistolary ‘‘Letters: to him,’’Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted