Carolyn Kizer, 89, died last week at a nursing home in Sonoma, California. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for her collection, Yin (1984), and is known for writing satirical, witty, and politically engaged poetry.

Kizer wrote in traditional metrical verse, inspired by the English poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and through her work, explored a wide variety of ideas. Though it’s difficult to neatly classify the kinds of themes she explored in her poetry, one through-line since the early 1950s has been her focus on the concerns of women. “She was a feminist practically before the term existed,” New York Times writer Melanie Rehak wrote in her review of Kizer’s Cool, Calm, & Collected, Poems 1960-2000. Indeed, the collection Yin was named for the feminine principle in the Chinese concept of yin and yang, as New York Times writer Matt Schudel writes in his obituary of Kizer.

Kizer herself said in an interview published by the Paris Review in 2000 that her concerns in poetry primarily focused on “the impact of character upon character, how people rub against one another and alter one another…. A poem of mine called ‘Twelve O’Clock’… was based on that principle of Heisenberg’s that you can’t look at a subatomic particle without altering it,” she said. “Equally, you cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.”

Kizer, who was born in Spokane, Washington, and later divided her time between California and Paris, cofounded the prestigious journal Poetry Northwest, traveled to Pakistan as a US State Department specialist, taught at various institutions, including Kinnaird College for Women, and served as the first literary director of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966. In addition to writing, teaching, and lecturing, she also translated poetry from different languages, including Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese. She served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995-1998, and resigned to protest the lack of minorities on the academy’s board.

A former President of the AWP Board of Directors, Kizer was, in the words of AWP Executive Director David Fenza, “One of the great poets, mentors, editors, activists, movers, and shakers of our tribe.” Her numerous awards include the Frost Medal, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

Photo: Carolyn Kizer reads from Cool, Calm, & Collected at the 2001 AWP Conference in Palm Springs.