According to Cassandra Robison, editor of Magnolia: a Florida Journal of Literary Arts, “Lynn Strongin may be the Emily Dickinson of our times.” Indeed, Lynn does have an extremely inventive, original style and lends to her work a charismatic moral force that well justify the comparison.
And this year she has two new books to add to her considerable ouvre: Bread of the Angels, published by the Ravenna Press; and Orphan Thorns, published by Albuquerque’s JB Stillwater Publishing.
Both draw on a common thread of thematic and contextual experience. Most prominent is Lynn’s childhood acquaintance, as a victim of the post-WWII polio epidemic, of hospital wards and their young inhabitants, whether suffering from polio or some form of cancer or something else. Certainly a great portion if not all of her poetry is imbued with a consciousness of that personal and collective trauma, but in no way does this constant reduce the poetry to just another trite account of illness and overcoming. This poetry’s scope is universal in every way, encompassing the fruits of war in Europe and the growing environmental crisis from clear-cutting of mountain tops in the United States to Japan’s nuclear tragedy and recent meltdown.
She alludes, for instance, to “Nippon’s unprecedented multiple crisis of earthquake, tsunami, and radiation leak”; and then, a few lines later:
Stirring memories of Japan’s nuclear history
The shattered glass
The shattered bones
The rape of radiation
No morning can be radiant when this is going on.
In any case there exists in Lynn Strongin’s poetry a great deal of sheer beauty and childish delight. Consider the simple sensuous pleasure of wordplays like “Rodents tunnel deeper runnel thru it,” for example, and “keep your troth bringfroth / flower uncouth”; and, in poetry so rich in literary and artistic allusion of all sorts, name deformations like “Gertrude Stun” for Stein[slant rhyme with own end of next line], and, later “Friday [for Frida] Kahlo” – the pair of allusions to the great Mexican artist that I remember are highly appropriate, and at least once explicitly so, given her own life-long struggle with pain.
I have been thinking about Lynn Strongin’s poems and wondering how profitably they might be read by high school students. While not for the weaker readers or the least mature, I think very profitably indeed for older ones, at least, perhaps girls more than boys though that is a pity, in particular, boys or girls, those with a certain sensibility to the suffering of others.
In any case there exists in Lynn Strongin’s poetry a great deal of sheer beauty and childish delight. Consider the simple sensuous pleasure of wordplays like “Rodents tunnel deeper runnel thru it,” for example, and “keep your troth bringfroth / flower uncouth”; and, in poetry so rich in literary and artistic allusion of all sorts, name deformations like “Gertrude Stun” for Stein[slant rhyme with own end of next line], and, later “Friday [for Frida] Kahlo” – the pair of allusions to the great Mexican artist that I remember are highly appropriate, and at least once explicitly so, given her own life-long struggle with pain.
I have been thinking about Lynn Strongin’s poems and wondering how profitably they might be read by high school students. While not for the weaker readers or the least mature, I think very profitably indeed for older ones, at least, perhaps girls more than boys though that is a pity, in particular, boys or girls, those with a certain sensibility to the suffering of others.
