Kathleen Fraser — poet and longtime S.F. State professor
Kathleen Fraser, a poet and former professor at San Francisco State University, died last Tuesday at age 83.
Her death from natural causes was confirmed by her publisher, Nightboat Books.
Fraser wrote more than 15 books, including poetry, essay collections and collaborations with artists. Her first book, “Change of Address,” was published in 1966.
She was a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State from 1972 to 1992. She directed the Poetry Center at SFSU and founded the school’s American Poetry Archives. She also taught at the California College of the Arts, the University of Iowa and Reed College in Portland, Ore.
Fraser was born in Tulsa, Okla., and graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles before moving to New York City to work as an editorial associate for Mademoiselle magazine. While in New York she studied with poets Stanley Kunitz and Kenneth Koch and came into contact with poets associated with Black Mountain, the Objectivists and the New York School.
Fraser absorbed aspects of the various schools of poetry but never wanted to be pigeonholed, according to Nightboat Books Publisher Stephen Motika, who described the poet as a “live wire” with a “completely flexible mind.”
“She was ageless, and so disinterested in being staid or settled,” said Motika. “She was restless as a writer and thinker.”
Starting in the early 1980s, Fraser split her time between San Francisco and Rome and would often stop in New York, where she had many artist friends. She liked the rich street life she found in Rome’s piazzas and became fluent in Italian.
“She had an amazing ear. She was a great lyric poet. She had poetry in her,” said Motika. “She is a little hard to contain because her career is so varied. There are so many different modes. That is rare in American poetry.”
Her final posthumous volume of collected poems will be published by Nightboat Books in 2020. Susan Gevirtz, a poet who is co-editing the collection with Motika, said Fraser “was just extremely grateful to us for taking the project on.”
Gevirtz and Motika have been going through more than 60 years of Fraser’s papers — she was a prolific letter writer and essayist in addition to the verse — and still have to sift through whatever unpublished work she left behind on her computer.
“The most exciting thing about working on the collection is discovering work we had no idea existed,” she said.
Fraser is survived by her husband, Arthur Bierman; son, David Marshall; sister, Anne Bagwell; brother, Jim Fraser; and niece, Beth Bagwell.