Mary Paniccia Carden is Professor of English and Dean of the College of Education, Arts, and Humanities at PennWest University. She is the author of Women Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and Intertextuality (University of Virginia Press, 2018), which explores the autobiographical practices of Beat-associated women. She published a previous article on Joanne Kyger, as well as work on Joyce Johnson, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady. Other publications include essays on Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Louise Erdrich, Willa Cather, and Jane Smiley. Her research interests include women’s autobiography and poetry of the #MMIW movement. Jane Falk, retired Senior Lecturer from the Department of English, University of Akron, has written essays on the work of a number of members of the Beat Generation, most notably Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, as well as on Beat writing practices and Beats and film. Her dissertation, The Beat Avant-Garde, the 1950’s, and the Popularizing of Zen Buddhism in the United States (2002), Ohio State University, grew out of a class on Zen and the Beats Falk took with Kyger at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In addition to taking classes with Kyger, Falk had the opportunity to interview her several times.

• List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Joanne Kyger: A Poet in Place and Time Jane Falk and Mary Paniccia Carden2 Artists of a Floating World: Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg’s Rainy Day Sea of Japan Mark Gonnerman3 Real and Mythopoetic Geographies: Reading Joanne Kyger’s “fragmented. ie several valleys.” in Kyoto” Linda Russo4 Mythic Space and Joanne Kyger’s Poetics of Integration Mary Paniccia Carden5 “It wasn’t going to go anywhere”: Joanne Kyger’s Poetics of the Ordinary Sara Laws6 Joanne Kyger’s Desecheo Notebook and the Beat Veneration Amy L. Friedman7 “See the truly enlightened other”: Kyger, Buddhism, and Drugs Timothy Gray8 Again as Eco-Dharma: The Generosity of Joanne Kyger’s Ecopoetics Jonathan Skinner9 “these words about words/ beyond words”: Reading Joanne Kyger’s “For the Pittosporum Tenuifolium Outside the Studio Window” Stephen Ratcliffe10 Joanne Kyger at Naropa University Andrew Schelling11 Poet in Time of Crisis: The Political Joanne Kyger Jane Falk12 Alice Notley on Joanne Kyger: “Utterly Herself” An Interview by Jane Falk13 Afterword: Joanne Kyger: Then and Now John Whalen-Bridge