Joanne Kyger was born in Vallejo, California, in 1934. Her father was a navy officer, and the family moved often before settling in Santa Barbara when she was fourteen. After studying at the university there, she moved to San Francisco in 1957, just as the city’s poetry scene was at its liveliest, and found her way into the circle around the poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan.

She was one of the few women who were treated as poets, rather than girlfriends, in that famously masculine world, and she earned it by being sharper, funnier and freer than almost anyone in the room. In 1960 she married the poet Gary Snyder in Japan, and for four years she lived in Kyoto, studying Zen and keeping a journal. In 1962 she traveled through India with Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, and her account of the journey, later published as Strange Big Moon, is one of the liveliest records of the Beats abroad.

Her first book of poems, The Tapestry and the Web, appeared in 1965. Soon afterward she settled in Bolinas, a small town on the coast north of San Francisco, and she lived there for the rest of her life, nearly fifty years. Bolinas became a kind of poets’ village, and Kyger was at the heart of it for decades, writing, teaching and welcoming the younger poets who came to find her.

Her poems read like a journal of attention: the weather, the birds, a friend dropping by, the news on the radio, a passing thought about the Buddha or the Greek gods. They are short-lined, loose and conversational, and they make the ordinary day feel spacious and alive. Many younger poets, women especially, have found in her a model of how to write a whole life into poetry without inflating it.

Her collected poems, About Now, came out in 2007, and her last book, On Time, in 2015. She died in Bolinas in 2017, at 82.