Spivack, Kathleen 1938–

Ms Spivack is an American poet. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)

Spivack is wonderful—sensitive, knowledgeable about language and culture, unpretentious, strong. She writes as a woman, but there is none of the shrill or histrionic about it, as seems sometimes to be the case with the new generation of women poets, torn between the cause of Women's Lib and that of human liberation.

Here [are the closing lines of] Ms. Spivack's title poem [of Flying Inland]: …

       Five seagulls, circumflex accents, drift by—        nothing to speak of in the heaving sky.

It seems beside the point to comment on anything that fine, that splendidly managed and closed. Such quiet and lovely strokes as the final couplet appear throughout the book. And there are risks. A poem about a dead child, called "Kim" [is an example]….

Who besides Ransom has taken that risk and won, as Spivack does? (p. 305)

Anthony Ostroff, in Western Humanities Review (copyright, 1974, University of Utah), Summer, 1974.

With a few exceptions, the most satisfying poems in Flying Inland revolve around two cycles, which are perhaps the same: life blossoming out of death and dissolving again into it; consciousness growing into self-consciousness and then resisting or longing for release. (p. 93)

None of the poems in Flying Inland breaks through to joy or (mercifully) "evangelical fervor." Spivak's sense of the miracles and horrors of biological economy often turns whimsical, however, and even rises to delight…. (p. 94)

[My] greatest problem with these poems is the persistent way everything ends up related to the poet's ego. The materials of the poems, the facts, come from a careful watching of inner and outer worlds, but finally one wearies of the assumption that those facts only exist in relation to the poet. Things, thinginess, the micro- and macro-events in this world, are not given the respect they are due…. [In] the great mass of poems presented, the many fine moments have trouble asserting themselves as themselves. (p. 96)

Peter Klappert, in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (copyright © by Parnassus: Poetry in Review), Fall/Winter, 1974.

Kathleen Spivack speaks in the preface to ["The Jane Poems"] about what she thinks goes on in them; "… the use of a persona, Jane, gives me the freedom to move between personal experience and a larger view of contemporary life. Jane is Everywoman…". But how "personal" is the personal experience of Everywoman, especially when something called a "persona" is dragged in?

               Walking in Harvard Square                  one morning                under summer skies                Jane averts her eyes—                all around her in deep                  trenches                Asian bodies lie                Jane is bare-armed, bleeding                and she dies                and dies and dies

Titled "Jane witnesses the destruction of the world," neither the lines nor the title's Yeatsian echo make this Jane convincingly crazy enough. The lack of punctuation, the breathy space between "bare-armed" and "bleeding," the childlike rhymes, are embarrassing rather than universalizing; it is a shame to have "Asian bodies" used in this all-too-poetic way. Or to have Jane-Everywoman stalked by the inevitable "rapist … dropping his sperm on her like bombs." At moments the poems attempt to stand off from self-importance ("I am the universal/Plain Jane"), but one would prefer Kathleen Spivack to have ditched the whole Jane-business and spoken out instead with no more resources than language provides. Granted that these poems were written, as she tells us, in a time of "intense political turmoil," one needs more than the assurance that she really feels that turmoil in order to move from Harvard Square to Asia in a couple...