Mermaids in the Basement

by Carolyn Kizer

A collection of "poems for women" from the Pulitzer Prize winner. A New York Times notable book.

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born in 1925 in Spokane, Washington. Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizer’s childhood was suffused with poetry. Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of [John] Keats; mother went for [Walt] Whitman. No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to. But I think my choices of [Gertrude] Stein and [George Bernard] Shaw show that my tastes were different. I remember that when I was eleven or twelve I came storming home from school demanding, ‘Why didn't you ever tell me about [Alexander] Pope and [John] Dryden?’ They were stunned. Our library, copious as it was, didn't contain the works of either. These were lasting influences. I have continued to prefer, and write, poems that have what you might call ‘a sting in the tail.’ Add Catullus and Juvenal. I adored wit, irony, and intellectual precision.” Kizer’s work is known for just those traits. From her early poems in The Ungrateful Garden (1961) to the Pulitzer-prize winning Yin: New Poems (1984) to such later works as Pro Femina (2000), which satirizes liberated women writers by mimicking the hexameter used by the ancient misogynist poet Juvenal, and her retrospective Calm, Cool, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001), Kizer’s work has received acclaim for its intellectual rigor, formal mastery, and willingness to engage with political realities. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Carolyn Kizer is a kind of institution... For over 40 years, she's made poems with a stern work ethic of literary thought and linguistic scrupulousness.” In an interview with Allan Jalon for the Los Angeles Times, Kizer described her own style: “I’m not a formalist, not a confessional poet, not strictly a free-verse poet.” Jalon described Kizer as, “Tough without being cold, sometimes satirical (she’s a great admirer of Alexander Pope),” and noted that “her work expresses a worldly largeness that repeatedly focuses on the points at which lives meet. ‘That’s my subject,’” concluded Kizer. “No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.”

Reviews

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was nice to see a lot of the same poems as in "Midnight Was My Cry" but arranged in a way that made more sense, and juxtaposed with other poems that really rounded them out. This book is specifically "poems for women," and when it was released in 1984 it was a big deal. "Pro Femina" is probably the most famous poem she ever wrote; I liked it, but I did not like the fourth part, "Fanny," which really didn't seem to fit with the rest of the poem. At the time it may have felt like an edgy feminist poem (based on the diary of Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in Samoa for a time) but reading it now, I just feel like I'm reading a colonizer narrative that's reveling in taming the savage tropical land by planting pineapples and other non-native plants. I didn't like it.
Other poems that I found surprising were "Semele, Recycled" and her subsection "Chinese Love," which had really beautiful translations and other poems inspired by Chinese poems, and her section on a breakup that was more like a diary, "A month in summer."

[Nathan Albright · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, when I was getting this book from the library, intrigued by its title, I did not see the subtitle of the book stating that this book, like so many that I read, was intended for an audience which I am most definitely not a part of [1].  In this particular case, I have to say that my being a man, and being a strong fan of the Judeo-Christian religious worldview, does not make very fond of this book.  Even though this book is aimed at women, I suspect there are a great many women who will not like what this book has to say, not least because the book attacks those women who were not themselves overtly hostile to men (Jane Austen is one of those who in a particular poem is insulted as being a cabbagehead for worshipping God as a man (41)).  If you are a woman and not fond of the supposed "sacred feminine" paganism this book endorses, the author is calling you cabbagehead.  I suppose she has worse opinions of men, but someone with that lack of charity of spirit and that lack of accuracy and good sense is not someone whose opinion matters too much.

Thankfully, this book is rather short at just over 100 pages, because it has little to offer a great many of its potential readers.  The books are divided into seven parts.  The first part looks at Mothers and Daughters, reflecting on marriage and family and having some disturbingly incestuous aspects to some of its lines.  The second part of the book is written for female friends, of which the author apparently only has five (for the amount of poems there are).  It is a wonder that the author has as many friends as she claims, given her overall lack of kindness in her lines.  The third part of the book consists of a four part poem "Pro Femina," which may be the least essential thing that needs more written about it, as someone who has suffered through dozens of books that resolutely ignore men and their concerns altogether.  The fourth part of the book is devoted in true weebalo-like fashion to Chinese love, showing the author's fondness for Eastern poetry, much of which is quite skilled in its execution.  The fifth part of the book consists of a few poems that show the author's interest in heathen Greek mythology.  The sixth part of the book consists of a long poem dedicated to a month in summer, while the seventh and last section of poems consists of the author's random and highly odd reflections on where she has been all her life, as if anyone wanted to know.

I am of two minds regarding this book.  One the one hand, the author is clearly a skilled poet when it comes to technical matters.  If the subject matter and approach of the poems had been less personally hostile in terms of matters of gender as well as religious worldview, I would have viewed this collection of poems very highly.  But that is precisely the problem.  A book of technically skilled poems of a wide variety of types shows off the virtuosity of the poet, to be sure, but the poet forgets that the first order of business when writing a book is to make the book acceptable to its audience when it is within his or her power to do so.  This book manages to be both false in its worldview as well as deliberately provocative to the point of being offensive to any man worth being called by the name and to the majority of the world's women.  Unfortunately, this book's target audience consists of neo-pagan women and present and future bitter misanthropic cat women, and that is not an audience I either write for or consider myself particularly sympathetic with.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

[Carolyn O · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Arielle Hebert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kizer is a champion for women. Her poetry warns us, praises us, makes us glitter and glow.

Her iconic poem "Bitch" made me buy this collection.
My other favorite titles in this collection are "For Jan as the End Draws Near," "A Widow in Wintertime," "Pro Femina"(esp. Three), "Hiding Our Love," and "Thrall."

_Mermaids in the Basement_ deals with many themes, including life, death, the anxiety of being a woman, motherhood, self-shame, longing for the dead, and loneliness.

A must read, especially for women.

From "For Jan as the End Draws Near"

"We never believed in safety
Certainly not in numbers
And little more alone.

Picking peas in California
Was our old jest of how we'd end our days
When we knew there was no providence,
Not any."

[Harley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not the biggest poetry reader in the world, but I love Carolyn Kizer. Her "Pro Femina" poems, which are in this volume, and the very funny "Bitch," the poems for her friends -- I just wish I knew her in person. She's from Spokane, so maybe I could meet her sometime.

[Christina M Rau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carolyn Kizer's poetry about myth and lore sometimes outshines the original tales. The section called Chinese Love reveals how minimalism shows so much. The drawbacks for me were the prosey sections of long poems. Overall, a nice collection that demonstrates the essence of poetic skill.

[Heidi Rhea]

Great characters in this book. Crazy, rich southern women.