Thursday, December 12, 2019

LYN LIFSHIN R.I.P.

Lyn Lifshin was born the same year I was, 1942, and her poetry started being published in little magazines when they began to blossom and multiply in the 1960s, as my poetry did too. We both had poems in many of the same magazines back then so often, I felt like I knew her, like we were some kind of secret poet friends. I don't remember if we corresponded at all, though I feel like we did.

I was often advised by poet friends that I published too much, and to be more selective about where I published. But my policy was to say yes to life, including anyone who asked for poems. Although whoever wrote the wikipedia entry on me links me to The New York School, and I certainly was influenced by the poets originally self-branded with that name, though they meant it ironically at first, I always felt like an outsider, along with Lyn, even though all the poets in the original generation of The New York School who were still alive when they discovered me in the early 1970s generously accepted me and my work which appeared in many magazines associated with them.

Lyn's work didn't appear in those mags, but in so many others that for every hundred poems of mine published in little mags back in the day, a thousand of her poems were published. I write every day and have since I learned to write as a boy, but Lyn Lifshin has written and published so much more, and most of it distinct, and good.

She deserved a lot more recognition from poets and critics and academics who dismissed or disparaged her kind of poetry (as many have mine), and I'm sorry I never wrote about her until now. Especially since her work has never not been a part of my life. We appeared in magazines together when we started out, and we appeared in a little magazine together just this year! Our poems sharing space in literary magazines for six decades!

As an example of her best work, to my mind, here's a poem of hers that was published in a 1999 Penguin poetry anthology called Identity Lessons edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan that I too had a poem in as well:

Yellow Roses

pinned on stiff tulle,
glowed in the painted
high school moonlight.
Mario Lanza's "Oh my
love, my darling"
over the basketball
floor. When Doug
dipped, I smelled
Clearasil. Hours in
the tub dreaming of
Dick Wood's fingers
cutting in, sweeping
me close. I wouldn't
care if the stuck
pin on the roses
went thru me,
the yellow musk
would be a wreath
on the grave of that
awful dance where
Louise and I sat
pretending we didn't
care, our socks fat
with bells and fuzzy
ribbons, bloated and
silly as we felt. I
wanted to be home,
wanted the locked
bathroom to cry in,
knew some part of me
would never stop
waiting to be
asked to dance.

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