Carolyn Kizer has had a remarkably full and varied life in literature. Born in Spokane, she studied poetry with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, founded the literary journal Poetry Northwest, and was the first director of the Literature Program for the National Endowment of the Arts; she taught at numerous institutions, and in 1985 won the Pulitzer Prize for her volume Yin: New Poems. Her warm, accessible, and humorous poems offer shrewd insights into human motivations and behavior.
More By This Poet
Through a Glass Eye, Lightly
In the laboratory waiting room
containing
one television actor with a teary face
trying a contact lens;
two muscular victims of industrial accidents;
several vain women—I was one of them—
came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye.
It was a long day:
Deborah waiting for the...