Kathleen Fraser - Infinite Women

This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.

Born: 22 March 1935, United States
Died: 5 February 2019
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

A contemporary American poet, writer, and visual artist, Kathleen Fraser was born in 1935, in Oklahoma, and raised in Colorado and California. She graduated from Occidental College (California) with a degree in English Literature in 1959. She moved to New York City, working as an editorial assistant for Mademoiselle magazine before pursuing her poetic studies with Stanley Kunitz at The 92nd St. Y “Poetry Center.” Additionally, she studied briefly with Robert Lowell and Kenneth Koch at The New School. During this time, she began to meet several prominent New York poets and artists associated with the Black Mountain School, The Objectivists, and the New York School, including Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, and Basil Bunting.
After the publication of her first book, Change of Address (Kayak, 1968), Fraser taught as a poet-in-residence for two years at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Subsequently, she taught contemporary literature and writing at Reed College and at San Francisco State University (SFSU) where she remained as a Professor of Creative Writing through 1992. At SFSU, she also directed The Poetry Center and founded the American Poetry Archives. Long committed to the experimental tradition and known as a socio-political activist who is “actively seeking out…literary mothers” (Kinnahan 183), Fraser questions the erasure of modernist women such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and H.D., and how their recovered voices might impact contemporary women writers. Seeking to change this unfortunate positioning and recover these female poets, she began the little magazine, HOW(ever).
Launched in 1983, HOW(ever) is a little magazine focused on innovative writings by contemporary women and “erased” or neglected texts by Anglo/American modernist women writers. A journal for experimental women’s poetry, HOW(ever) brings forward the importance and vitality of modernist women poets by focusing on innovative writing by contemporary women writers and culturally-abandoned texts by Anglo/American modernist women writers. Fraser states, “HOW(ever) proposes to make a bridge between scholars thinking about women’s language issues,” and “hopes to create a place in which poets can talk to scholars through poems and working notes on those poems” (HOW(ever)).
This publication is where Fraser locates Mina Loy as an influential voice of modernist and contemporary poetics. Through critical “commentary on neglected women poets who were/are making textures and structures of poetry,” Fraser delves into how modernist women writers such as Loy, “were writing to re-imagine how the language might describe the life of a woman thinking and changing” (HOW(ever)). The poetry these modernist women were writing, she points out in the first issue of HOW(ever), “wasn’t fitting into anyone’s anything because there wasn’t a clear place made for it” (HOW(ever). Fraser’s editing of HOW(ever) and later, HOW2 fostered revisions to an absent literary history, establishing a place for modernist women poets, including Mina Loy.
Additionally, in a 1996 essay, “Contingent Circumstances: Mina Loy/Basil Bunting,” which Fraser describes as a “little dialogue” (Translating 102), she interweaves Loy’s “Song of Joannes” and Bunting’s Odes. Published in 1998 in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation), this piece focuses on Bunting’s “Ode 17,” which is dedicated to Loy (103). In it Fraser connects the “comic irony regarding the male-female dance” (103) that metaphorically represents Bunting and Loy’s relationship.
Fraser has dedicated herself and her work to the recovery of women’s voices in both literature and the arts. Her honors and awards include the New School’s Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize (1964) and the American Academy’s Discovery Award (1964), as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1971, 1978) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981). Working primarily with small press publications, she has published more than fifteen books, including mixed-genre collections, a chapbook of collaged wall pieces, and an essay collection. Her published works include twelve volumes of poems and two children’s books. Additionally, she wrote and narrated the hour-long video Working Women in Literature. Fraser spent the remainder of her life between San Francisco and Rome where she lived with her husband, giving lectures and readings at local Italian universities. She passed away of natural causes on February, 5, 2019.