There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera

By Joanne Kyger
Edited by Cedar Sigo

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• The inaugural book of Wave’s new interview series, There You Are combines 40 years of interviews, letters, poems, and journals to present a narrative of the remarkable poet Joanne Kyger, who intersected with the most influential movements of late twentieth-century poetry yet remained rooted in her daily practice with a forthright attention to our present moment. 
  
  Finalist for the 2018 Firecracker Award in Nonfiction
  
  Finalist for the 2018 Northern Californian Book Award in Poetry
  
  

• This collection offers a revealing addition towards comprehending the wide range of influences and enchantments informing Kyger's practice as a poet... The several interviews collected in this volume capture Kyger at different moments along the path of her lifetime, providing, overall, an account of an existence lived intentionally, simply, thoughtfully and non-materialistically; an existence especially attuned to local ecology, and attention to, and deep appreciation for, a poetic articulation of the daily commonplace.
  Colin James Sanders, The Pacific Rim Review of Books

  One reads in her work great extremes of feeling, in which the scorpionic energies struggle to break though the casual forthrightness of her line, even as the steadiness and certainty of another day and another poem animate the drama of reading each poem next to the other.
  Jared Stanley, Jacket2

  Kyger consistently proves herself similarly committed to attending to the needs of the work first and foremost. Gorgeously laid out in an over-sized format, There You Are provides vivid documentation of the places and people in back of her poetry. It’s a smorgasbord of remembrances recounted in interviews from throughout her life.
  Patrick James Dunagan, 4 Square Review

• One of the major poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 in Vallejo, CA. After studying at UC Santa Barbara, she moved to San Francisco in 1957, where she became a member of the circle of poets centered around Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. In 1960, she joined Gary Snyder in Japan and soon traveled to India where, along with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, they met the Dalai Lama—all experiences she has written extensively about. She returned to California in 1964 and published her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, in 1965. In 1969, she settled on the coast north of San Francisco. She has published over 30 books of poetry and prose, including The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964 (2015), On Time: Poems 2005-2014 (2015), As Ever: Selected Poems (2002), and About Now: Collected Poems (2007), which won the 2008 Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. She taught at Naropa University, The New College of California, and Mills College. In 2006 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She passed away in March 2017. 
  
  Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently the Bagley Wright Lecture Series book Guard the Mysteries (Wave Books, 2021). He has taught workshops at St. Mary’s College, Naropa University and University Press Books. He is currently a mentor in the low residency MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.