Kimberly Lyons

Kimberly Lyons’s interview describes her introduction to New York School poetry via Paul Hoover in Chicago, her move to New York City in 1981, and integration with the community around The Poetry Project. She discusses her perception of New York School cohorts, particularly in terms of gendered divisions, and her work as Program Coordinator at The Poetry Project under Ed Friedman, including the intersection of Language poetry, new social and political energies, and networks of reading series and small presses across New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like Jordan Davis, Lyons narrates her experience inheriting and adapting an extended historical tradition bound up in the New York School. The interview concludes with Lyons’s poem ‘The Fairy Triple Changing Bouquet’.