Lynn Strongin was born in New York City in 1939. Her father Edward I. Strongin was a research psychologist, and her mother Marguerite (nee Rosenblum) was an artist who studied with Alexander Archipenko. Her younger sister, Martha ( Martha Strongin Katz, formerly violist with the Cleveland Quartet) was born in 1943.
During the war years, Strongin's father, then a psychologist working with injured and shell-shocked soldiers, was posted to numerous locations around the Eastern and Southern States. Strongin's mother, sister, and she lived in cities, isolated hamlets, on small hardscrabble farms-- wherever would keep them close to her father.
Her family's travels through the South, when most establishments and neighbourhoods prided themselves on their "no negroes, no Jews" policy, affected her deeply, and explorations of those experiences are found throughout her work.
Strongin's parents divorced in 1949. In the summer of 1951, Strongin contracted polio at the age of twelve. After a brief stay in a New York hospital, she was moved to the New York State Rehabilitation Center at Haverstraw, New York, where she stayed in the children's ward for six months.
Upon her return home, her mother moved the family into an apartment in Manhattan. There, Strongin continued her schooling through the city's home-schooling program. She also studied piano while her sister studied the violin.
After graduating from high school, Strongin first studied composition with Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music. When she found that music alone would not provide the expressive forms her creativity demanded, she transferred to Hunter College to study literature.
She graduated from Hunter cum laude in 1962, and, having won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, went to Stanford University where she obtained an M.A. in 1964.
After graduating from Stanford, Strongin taught at various post-secondary institutions in New York State and California. It was when she was teaching in the Berkeley/Oakland area, that she connected with writers such as Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Kay Boyle, Paul Mariah, and Josephine Miles.
In 1971, Strongin moved to Albuquerque to start her Doctoral studies at the University of New Mexico. In the same year, she received a National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing grant; her first book, The Dwarf Cycle, was published the next year.
From 1971 to 1979, Strongin lived, studied, and taught in Albuquerque. Her studies in 1977-78 were supported by an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Fellowship.
During her time in Albuquerque, her other six poetry books were published. The last book, Countrywoman/ Surgeon, was a candidate for the 1979 Elliston Award.
In 1979, Strongin moved to Canada for what was intended to be a short stay. She remained, and now lives in her adopted land, British Columbia, Canada and has recently recieved three nominations for the 2007 Pushcart Prize.
For more information regarding Lynn Strongin's life and work visit her website: http://members.shaw.ca/stronginweb/index.html
The following poem appeared in the literary journal Factes. Wind blows rain thru the window It is Seoul. You will soon concertize in Korea and have in Japan. What do I know of these places? There is the sound of bicycles & it rains all the time. At eighteen, in the middle of the night, you fled the apartment for Harlem. Mother threw the valise at you as she had at our father. Cinder blocks of lights were just flickering on like those in basket-boats in Vietnam The streets were almost deserted the downpour kept pushing itself thru my open window soaking my hands reminded me of the morning I decided I would follow you uptown to Harlem: Both of us neon in our eyes rinsing them Magyar-green. The following poem will be printed in Konundrum Engine a literary magazine. Desolation July 2 beginning to close in [Polio anniversary 55 years ago] I'd rather wake in a Russian forest rimmed with blue Siberian ice: this is like a committee meeting at the end of the Soviet era, reading Samizdat newspapers, under a bare yellow bulb. the fly whose feet dipped in virus; barbed-wire birds of our time. These bitten-down poems like sweaters unraveling. Heat. Yellow electrical storm. Groundhogs worked in Caissons under Brooklyn suffering the Bends before Bends were know: lit by fire from within. Smoke in my sickroom struck from an incense ball clouding radio, childhood's books, hall-telephone undialed by mother to phone the pediatrician , despite the agony, till dawn. Take from me that window carry it in your arms: But don't suffocate it Let it live. From birth, I have had, an unquiet mind from birth on: where only heaven & the nurse were & heavenly Slavic white-nights harm The following poems were printed originally in Foliate Oak an online literary magazine in 2006. Rembrandt's Smock ( for Jewish new year) Always hovering over him an envelope cobalt ash mixed with pewter & bending glass the ominous translucent light of Rotterdam small deaths of his children long visiting hours at the grave: the crack in the globe thru which the dark shone (a teal envelope protecting him) a thin window stands before him giving onto brick a concave mirror in his background: Once lean red foxes traveled earth thru flame: once silver spilled from glass & in canals ran. Once it was a bolt of measured blue- black cloth the smock. Now that Rooks took Northern Europe blond wheat stacks stooks surge & sear whitegold flame: none of it contained the cobalt the indigo ocean washing within him billowing swirling but his smock caught reflections which gathered clouds before snow storm that broke: no birth without blood, visiting the small graves of his children, an ironlight seeping into everything. Enfolding him one black tulip smock Some nights he hangs it on no nail but it wraps him he goes to sleep in exhausted by his easel (his apprentice Tulp, a lost dream) The painter wakes eyes burning poor sleep nightmares broken bleak black steeds stale day-old bread to paint again & again the Jews of Rotterdam. * Rebrandt's smock a snow bank black in night caved in him hanging in effigy: a shock of wildwheats blended in pockets from summer. The crack in the world thru which the light shone: buried his barely born kinder. Turp. Lemon yellow cyan. Linseed in nostrils, lungs: In old age there are the huge canvases cut up kneeling on the icy stone floor to sell small ones for folk to patch holes in their draughty Holland kitchens. The smock puff sleeves round collar he is an older Titus (who is still a boy, a virgin): his one son who lived: Rembrandt sleeps the painter in his paint: tints, hues, dyes, pigments: oils, umbers, argents pressed into his bones: He will rise in blackness before dawn to offer cursory prayer drink bitter coffee rinds Death Penury Debt climb heaven before him a cloud, Plague: Quarantine bypassed him, the Black Death which followed one from home to home canal to canal behind him surges a pack steel-brushed of hounds bypassed him. a chorus of charcoal voices a chorale rises the sketch; carbon under his fingernails darkness of altos in choirs in his ribs takes shape: pastels soft as Sunday morning's egg sky hard as thorns. Hollow the box of collection coin Hell-hues on Sundays passed round like a bird with broken wings: Congregants cast eyes down. Death is an empty mirror. Hounds about him barking like the judges, the physicians those magpies flapping Death about the courthouse & anatomy lesson. A wood box panel slid open. Abacus beads of his spine creak, a February morning. Sky the color of burnished leather. * It is true that some of his smaller cut-up paintings were used to patch cold in the mortar of Amsterdam houses: His eyes glass over. He has at times taken a worn chamois to fashion a horse, doll for the boy or girl, some crude toy: The color of the eyes of the Jews what to make of them? A galaxy of stars. Saskia is rising, plump breasts spilling out of green satin bodice: dark gold cross-laced. Titus in his beret, crush hat, reflection of the father's copper eyes is gleaming. Sky like porridge. North light like great boats froze in harbor ice cracking, thunder of guns. Sky white translucent as glass the skin of an onion: Black crush- beret velour contours belongs to boyhood still beautiful as a girl but it's his sun radiating: like thorns in the crown of Christ throwing spike light into corners, caressing all things. Antwerp Amsterdam Utrecht medieval towns changed with the changing northern light blush of color in cheeks left for the girl. But the smock he slipped on each morning once a bolt of coarse cloth now is silk with colors: its countries swirls of oil linseed turp pressed crusht some nights pitch him into dreams l a pitchfork thrusting hay into a fire. Bales. Ricks. Foghorns pierce Dutch winter: A shaft of old gold sun transpierces his heart like the pearl the girl's ear: she makes lace. His smock it enfolded refolded him each Dutch morning despite Death Debt Penury the cold the only enfold ment (Tulp under ice his blush-lips) the crack in the globe that let shine sin & sun sombre pewter. O Cloak of many colors, what is Joseph to this? the crack in the globe that let shine sin & sun the deepest call culling, coloring lung-breath indrawn for the titling, then God descend, then do the deepest act, the titling: sign the linen. The Boy Who Eats Jackets Boy wolfing cotton; keep him from open flame. That dust so shine (Hound dogs in Guatemala are starved during mudslide going after what cadavers they can.) Isaiah a Black boy born with HIV took to jacket-eating. One winter he ate a pillow & 3 jackets. Did he get warm? Looking at his picture I receive word that my baby portrait is stuck at customs let the image flow in like milk: Forged documents out of the question. Waylaid in Richmond. Days in the cold United Parcel 5 p.m. Sunday took it from Severance, Michigan the night weather turned. Folk were shrugging winter jackets on. I pictured him as I saw border-battles paint cracking the very features aging antiqued by frost first snow blowing. Keep Isaiah from open flame: The crack in the world thru which light shines. Woodchip colored jacket upturned collar i. Always to ride over bumps in a road shimmering Last hummingbird beak pencil-thin graphing air autumn yellow melancholy as schoolrooms. Measuring tape: watermark # mine: when red doesn't exist he imagines it. No cicada in underbrush. ii. You who say you are obsessed with me I am far from happy: Pray tell me details of your Catholic grammar school warm blankets on a blazing night cruel needle memory: it's steeple steel. Report. Short. Finding orgasm is like finding a needle in a haystack. Back we walk talk like silk masqueraded as flame we wore in prison.. In oatmeal colored collar woodchip upturned I keep my legs closed like an old-fashioned lady but I burn: emotion intensifies. Come nearer, I say, blind, reading Braille blue flowers of love opening. Odessa was my ancestral home. the crack in the globe that let shine sin & sun sombre pressed some nights pitch him into dreams fork thrusting hay into a fire. Bales. O Cloak of many colors, what is Joseph to this? despite Death Debt Penury the cold the only enfold ment (Tulp, his apprentice, a frozen dream under ice his blush-lips) the crack in the globe that let shine sin & sun sombre the deepest call culling, coloring lung-breath indrawn for the titling, then God descend, then do the deepest act, the titling: sign the linen.
Uncaged of Pain... A Review of Lynn Strongin's chapbook Dovey & Me
by Cassandra Robison
Lynn Strongin has been student, assistant, colleague, and peer to some of the finest voices in modern and
contemporary poetry in America during the past half century. She was protégé to a significant group of poets,
including Levertov and Duncan. Her graduate student interest in e.e. cummings is evident in her bravery with
punctuation and phrasing. Yet in Strongin, perhaps now more than ever before in her work, readers hear a singular
voice, eloquent and powerful, absolutely fresh and pure in persona, a voice that creates images so delicate and
sophisticated they are painful to read and difficult to wrap the mind around. One thinks of Emily Dickinson more
than any other poet. And Strongin is like Dickinson in other ways as well.
Dickinson and Strongin belong to a secular school all their own--female and existential. Somehow Strongin's poems
are those of a woman-child, much as Dickinson's seem. That does not imply weakness or child-ishness in any way; in
fact, quite the opposite is true. In these seemingly fragile women who spent much of their lives outside the norm,
on the periphery--Dickinson for her reasons and Strongin for her own--readers find courage, a daring to
provocatively confront issues no one else deals with in contemporary poetry and astonishing leaps of thought.
Strongin, whose background includes degrees in English and American Literature and honors such as the Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship at Stanford University, offers in Dovey & Me--a chapbook published in 2006 by Solo Press Chapbook
Series--an enigmatic group of poems both narrative and lyric that purportedly tell the story of the speaker's
relationship with Dovey, who may be a recluse, a homeless woman, or a doppelganger.
The chapbook was recently reviewed by critic Hugh Fox who says, "It is very difficult poetry…it wants to escape you,
doesn't want to be nailed down or defined. It took me three readings to "get" it." Of another Strongin chapbook,
Hugh Fox says, "on the third reading I came away feeling I'd been under the spell of a classic"
Indeed, "getting" Lynn Strongin is no simple task. There are layers of meaning in every line and every poem; one
wonders if the poet writes this way to cloak her truths like parables so that only the deserving--and I would guess
to her this means people who have knowledge of real suffering--"get it."
Integral to understanding Strongin's work is her lifelong battle with polio that began in childhood and that even
now, 60 years later, affects her daily movement.
Although it isn't current to advance such close biographical analysis with textual analysis, it seems impossible to
separate the two in her case because the suffering is tied to the poetry, an ability to view life sideways and
upside down, backwards and nonlinear.
One pictures the child Lynn lying in the cold ward of a New York City hospital, listening to the sounds of other
children struggling to breathe, witnessing their courage and their deaths. She is one of the survivors, and from
this island of survival she writes, from some place far within the self that is forged iron and unbreakable. Yet
even she hesitates to speak of her experience directly. It is only in her poems we get glimpses of the fine scalpel
line between living and dying, between torment and absolution.
In Dovey & Me, Dovey is a woman "born at Liverpool" and
When she becomes incommunicable,
I know how to reach my arms around her
old feathered
exile
beauty
battered & beaten
to perfection
like wind-polished stone.
(p. 6, "Born")
Together, the speaker and Dovey "boil kelp" because "Roast chicken belongs to / the castle on the hill" ("Winter &
Dovey Struggles Home," p. 7). Dovey loves books, "her one earthly passion" and "jewels. /A cabochon/of amethyst"
("Her One Earthly Passion", p. 8) Seemingly, they live like recluses ("an owl-like hermit") in "this hut by the
ocean" somewhere in a land of "…unbeatable rains" where they "…lie on the beach at night/as in a sweet potato shell
/ & hear the fog patch people bump together."
One motif weaving through the poems is that of birds and bird feathers:
A gull
or raven. She makes splints of driftwood till birds,
uncaged of pain,
fly freely again.
("She Can Bind a Broken Limb," p. 10)
and
Nobody understands us now:
Our tongue Elizabethan. We are known as the old
& the young
bird-women.
and
"Now I can fly away from it all."
…We have been together so long her wingtip reaches
for mine.
("Dovey Has a Triangle of a Mirror", pp. 11- 13).
She writes
A blinding white seagull feather
had cut
my eyeball like glass early in the evening, over
white wine…
("Dovey," p. 1)
The two women are outlaws from the human race; they live outside the "dream palace" "feared by the people on the
high hill" (p. 11). They speak in their own language, the language of survival.
Strongin writes of bones throughout this chapbook: "the bones war at the threat / as the blood does / at the threat
of wrong multiplications" (p. 13), broken bones, Dovey's "…bones are uneven" and
I ease her head into the pillow.
She grows calm.
Shakespeare
is what I choose to read her & his rich music
fills out bone,
We are
two souls
taking flight from fevers, crafting the violence, the
visions, into calm.
("Fever," p. 24)
Dovey seems to parallel Strongin's physical trauma as "Her spine, a twisted S. / When she is bad, she stays in our
hut all day / reading…She has the moon, its features carved of/hard stone / feldspar/pressed right into her chest /
against her spine" ("Dovey & Me," p. 4).
Elegiac in tone, some poems in this tight-fisted collection echo Biblical passages, another Dickinsonian technique:
This too will pass, like
the wind over the bled grains of green grass
blowing on the sand:
the fear that she will leave me
alone
a star to burn
like kerosene
consuming itself
in the hut
where we lived together so many decades:
No plan:
No place to turn.
("And This Too Will Pass," p. 14)
and again in
The prophecy that we might
we must
go our separate ways
the silence of the grass-green ocean
of the twenty-third
psalm.
("She is Grieving Her Last Enemy," p. 28)
Strongin is always looking for God in her poems, nowhere more fervently than in this collection of poems:
They are as black-purple
as currants shining
these last poems.
Something fine & dark must be coming on.
("They are as black-purple," p. 27)
She does not find God; she finds, instead, a resilient inner self that survives the inevitable loss of "Dovey." The
speaker says "I am around twelve / I begin writing;" and she continues, "Talent is the bird / even more than
Dovey, has her claws in me" ("Talent," p. 26). The gift for poetry sets the speaker and the poet free; it allows
the self to float over the wards of dying children just as it allows the speaker to "torch" Dovey on the cold sand
beach, scattering the ashes in the sea. It affords her a perspective both unusual and keen; she sees color
everywhere, light and darkness. The suffering combined with talent allowed Strongin to survive her prison of
physical self and move into the transcendent world of poetry where she finds salvation that is not God, per se, yet
it is transcendence:
The love
the everlasting outlasting love.
("Bonfire," p. 30)
Somehow, in the end, one imagines Dovey as the child--Strongin's imaginary friend, who held her safe in the
lonely polio wards of the 1950's. Dovey is then a second self, an inner angel, some partnership of spirit needed by
the self to endure physical trials. But it is the talent that lifts Strongin out of the
darkness. It becomes her music:
The sun melts like twisted red glass in winter.
But we have our radio on
to outdistance blackness,
a good old transistor.
("Music," p. 19)
The "radio" connotes her talent from whence she outruns "blackness." It seems Strongin writes out of that
exile of illness and defiance of norm as from some inner well of endurance. Her color imagery and her motifs of
birds, bones, living outside the "norm," seem to be metaphors of survival. In their perfect subjectivity lies their
universal truth as well. In this collection, the poet writes of how she took refuge in an imaginary land with an
imaginary woman who helped her escape the agonies of the flesh and who, in the end, could be cast off finally when
the adult woman survived, brilliant with her poetic gifts, here to bear witness.
Dovey & Me startles readers who struggle to get their minds around the whole story yet are swept by its gorgeous and
often painful imagery that builds from first to last poem. Although it is the story of two women, at least on the
surface, it speaks of all human fears of loving, losing, and physical illness, and all those truths about being
that haunt us all. One cannot find such daring in most contemporary poetry. It's an unusual group of poems, a
singular feat, as if Strongin had invented a new form of poetry. Her poems, like Dickinson's in the 19th century,
are existential and probe the essential issues. It is an amazing collection of poems, and it will have an impact on
the world of American poetry.