set the pattern for her future books, each of
which deliberately pursues a course of discovery
implicit in her earlier work—and each of which is
formally innovative. Thus, the work inBoundayr
freed Fraser to write poems such as Giotto:
Arena, first published as an entire issue ofAbacus
(15 November 1991) and collected inWhen New
Time Folds Up(1993). As Meredith Quartermain
observed in an important review (West Coast
Line, Winter 1994-1995), the title poem affords
the reader a remarkable complex of manifold
relations and voices, formally invoking and inter-
rogating the tradition of which it declares itself a
part. Carol Muske, in a judicious but nevertheless
enthusiastic review inThe New York Times Book
Review(6 February 1994), called Fraser a mav-
erick who ‘‘belongs to no school’’ and commented
that through her ‘‘voracious desire’’ to enter and
deconstruct language Fraser ‘‘demonstrates how
thinking evolves, how we think what we see and
vice versa,’’ remarking that the poems are to a
great extent the harvest of her rich early work
(influenced by poets as diverse as Frank O’Hara
and George Oppen) and her subsequent language
experiments. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, writing in
Sulfur(Spring 1994) on ‘‘the rich tinctures of
multifarious webbings’’ in these poems, pointed
to Fraser’s use of H. D. ‘‘for the pensive, illumi-
nating reading and rereading on signs (a play
with repetition and recirculation most striking
in the final, and title poem)’’ and of Virginia
Woolf for ‘‘the delicate, determined ‘deliberate
burdens through the temporal.’’’
Despite its extraordinary technical sophisti-
cation and capacity to disturb the reader, the
work inWhen New Time Folds Upand Fraser’s
more recent books is completely unintimidating.
Drawing on a great range of resources, including
graphics—and inWing(1995) playing with great
charm and indeed passion with the visual shape
of the poem—Fraser’s work has become more
and more playful and less and less dogmatic,
while at the same time cultivating a meditative
and cogitative stance and habit that continually
cultivate and exploit the random and the acci-
dental....Reading through Fraser’s work in
chronological order makes one see clearly that
her whole career has been a move away from
certainty and into discovery. Overall, it reflects
a great generosity of spirit, a necessary corollary
to a deep and abiding curiosity. The chief char-
acteristic of her work, persisting through its
abiding lyrical intensity and condensation and
love of color and the sheer body-ness of the
language and the vision, is its stubborn and cou-
rageous refusal to rest satisfied with any sort of
status quo, a determination to find a language
adequate to the writing occasion of which it is
witness: the perturbability of the writer....
The essay [...] ‘‘This Phrasing Unreliable
Except As Here’’ (published inTalisman, 1995),
could well serve as a motto for the collected
work, obedient as each poem is to the writing
occasion itself.
Source:Peter Quartermain, ‘‘Kathleen Fraser,’’ inDic-
tionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 169,American Poets
Since World War II, Fifth Series, edited by Joseph Conte,
Gale Research, 1996, pp. 106–15.Sources
Clippinger, David, Review ofil cuore: the heart; Selected
Poems (1970–1995),inChicago Review, Vol. 43, No. 4,
Fall 1997, pp. 162–65.
Fraser, Kathleen, ‘‘Poem in Which My Legs Are
Accepted,’’ inWhat I Want, Harper & Row, 1974,
pp. 25–27.
Keller, Lynn, ‘‘‘Just one of / the girls:– / normal in the
extreme’: Experimentalists-to-Be Starting Out in the
1960s,’’ indifferences, Vol. 12, No. 2, Summer 2001,
p. 55.
Muske, Carol, ‘‘Outside the Fence, Three Renegade
Stylists,’’ inNew York Times Book Review,February6,
1994, p. 32.
Taylor, Linda A., ‘‘‘A Seizure of Voice’: Language Inno-
vation and a Feminist Poetics in the Works of Kathleen
Fraser,’’ inContemporary Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2,
Summer 1992, pp. 337–72.Further Reading
Banes, Sally,Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Per-
formance and the Effervescent Body, Duke University
Press, 1993.
Avant-garde art and literature rose in popular-
ity during the 1960s. In this book, Banes
chronicles the people and events that consti-
tuted this creative movement.
Faludi, Susan,Backlash: The Undeclared War against
American Women, Crown, 1991.
Faludi reveals the second-wave backlash that
especially affected women seeking careers in
the 1980s. This book won the National Book
Critics Circle Award.Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted