‘‘to her,’’ and ‘‘to Barbara,’’ and the title of the
collection itself can be read as a punning and
coded resistance to another’s rule. These two
Kayak books are Fraser’s initial steps toward
exploring the physicality of language as experi-
ence: while they clearly and emphatically deal
with the apparent trivia of daily life, especially
in its domesticity (a focus in later years to be
closely identified with feminist writing), they cer-
tainly do not regard language as a clear glass
through which to regard the world. These
poems, later gathered in What I Want,are
intensely personal and intimate, paying astonish-
ingly close attention to the physical, the immedi-
ate materiality of experience.
On a visit to San Francisco in late spring 1969
George Starbuck, director of the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, offered Fraser and Marshall teaching
posts at the workshop, where Fraser taught from
1969 to 1971. The following year she was writer-
in-residence at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
(The couple was divorced in 1970.) Teaching
turned out to be Fraser’s vocation, and at Reed
her latent feminism began to emerge into infor-
mal classes on Stein and H. D. held at her house.
At that time the notion that the modernist women
writers had any relevance to feminism was
unfashionable in feminist politics, where a more
commonly spoken language was virtually de
rigueur for any woman who wanted acceptance
in the women’s writing community.
From Portland, Fraser moved to San Fran-
cisco, where she directed the San Francisco
Poetry Center (1973-1976) and taught creative
writing at San Francisco State University. In
1985 she began to spend up to five months of
each year working and living in Rome, where,
that same year, she married the philosopher A.
K. Bierman, whom she had met during her first
year at San Francisco State. Her experience in
Italy afforded radical linguistic and cultural
challenges that significantly informed and col-
ored the poems gathered inNotes Preceding
Trust(1987) and later collections. She retired
from San Francisco State as a full professor in
1993, having converted her position from full- to
part-time a few years earlier. Concurrent with
her first years in San Francisco, Fraser got to
know women writers whose work seemed gener-
atively close to her own[....] In 1974 Harper and
Row publishedWhat I Want, which consists
mainly of work gathered from her previous col-
lections, with some new poems that show an
intensifying commitment to syntactical experi-
ment and unconventional form.
The first major indication, however, of Fras-
er’s increasing alignment with experimental and
even avant-garde writing is Magritte Series
(1977), published by Lyn Hejinian as number
six in her Tuumba series of chapbooks. (Other
writers appearing in that ‘‘First Series’’ include
Dick Higgins, Susan Howe, and Kenneth Irby,
as well as Hejinian herself.) InMagritte Series—
to an even greater extent than in ‘‘The History of
My Feeling’’ and ‘‘Six Uneasy Songs’’ at the close
ofWhat I Want—it becomes clear that the writ-
ing is creating the situation to which it refers, a
mode no conventional reader can comfortably
accept, since reference is at a minimum. The
poems ofMagritte Serieswittily and disturb-
ingly play familiar ordinary syntax with the gro-
tesque, thereby constituting a stylistic equivalent
to the paintings of Rene ́ Magritte, to which the
poems seek to be companions.
These poems were later collected inNew
Shoes(1978), Fraser’s last book with a major
New York trade publisher. The wit and the cul-
tivation of the bizarre function as controlling
devices to keep the reader distant from—but at
the same time intensely aware of—the controlled
but never hidden high emotional charge of these
intensely personal poems. ‘‘One of the Chap-
ters,’’ for instance, tempers the poet’s sheer out-
rage at the preposterous difficulties of living in a
university town (where the men make up the
universe) through a carefully controlled comic
ironic tone, coupled with the important news
that the poem draws on someone else’s text.
Yet Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing this book in
The New York Times Book Review (13 August
1978), praised Fraser’s ‘‘delight in rhetorical
forms and...sense of what words mean’’ but
nevertheless concluded—perhaps with the delib-
erate grotesques of theMagritte Seriesspecifi-
cally in mind—that, ‘‘lushly synesthetic’’ and
‘‘full of appeal to the senses,’’ the work is at
times ‘‘self-absorbed to (and sometimes over)
the brink of solipsism and incoherence.’’What I
WantandNew Shoesreveal the extent to which
Fraser has learned to trust rather than bully the
reader—no mean feat when the poems are full of
scorn or anguish. The poems are remarkably
skillful, with Fraser firmly in control of the
meaning, which is transmitted with great emo-
tional impact to the reader.Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted