Getting Inside Strongin's Methodology

by Hugh Fox

The main secret to Lynn Strongin’s poetry techniques is the fact that there is no expected, predictable continuity in one line she writes.

Take a line like “an ice cycle of gold forming....” Okay. Stop there. An ice cycle? Not icicle but “cycle.” A cycle of ice. Your mind goes outside, right, you’re in some sort of seasonal cycle? And then ... let me finish the line: “An ice cycle of gold forming over the oatmeal pot.” (1) A gold cycle forming over an oatmeal pot? Totally unexpected.

Although a little later in the same poem there are some almost sequitur, not non-sequitur lines: “Rechargeable batteries could not light up our city / more vibrantly than the white wood carriages going / hearse-like / in rain....” But even here the comparison between rechargeable batteries and white wood carriages is totally unexpected. And going in the rain, not the snow.

She has one very interesting volume called Secrets You Tell Your Doll that has a picture of Strongin herself on the cover as a little girl, carrying her doll, and here again, get ready for the totally unexpected: “Doll clasps her bosom woman friend / To her slim chest / as one does / a civil war / Bandage / To a wound / An ancient wound: a winter one.” (2)

What I’m learning here is to avoid already-associated associations, to come up with metaphors / associations that have never been metaphored / associated before. And, of course, at the same time come up with comparisons that work, that bring you into new territories, new weltanshauungs, ways of looking at the world.

Like linking together hypodermic needle blades and going figure skating, with just a little extra “saber-toothed” thrown in to emphasize her own feral streak:

In the gravedigger’s hours, I hugged Xavier, my cat, saber-toothed I went
figure skating with hypodermic needle blades.
What was the other side of this Ganges? (3)

Sometimes in her narrative poems, she actually becomes sequential ... for a while. But the unexpected is always there waiting to be reintroduced.

Transported
untarnished, transported
we are in it alone
pencil-pain

broad strokes night flare.
I do not want my break with memory to preface high thermometer:
But fever did precede:
storing living emotions.
Closed shop to health. A network break I took.

Caught off guard
I raise my face to light
like a young lover for a kiss. (4)

I need a little help here with “pencil pain,” but then find myself emotionally transported with “I am your sapphire.” The unexpected just where it ought to be. And then after a very difficult gamboling around with fevers, emotions, closing shop to health and taking a break from networks (love-contacts?), suddenly the final image brings us back to neo-reality again. Light = love(r).

For about a thousand years I have been after Strongin to open up and explain the methodology of her writing. Is it all thought out, being non sequitur and suprising? Is it purposeful? Or is that just the way her mind flows? And if that is the way it flows, why? What’s the background of this sort of rich flow?

One day I asked her about sources and got back:

Emily Dickinson
Will Shakespeare
George Herbert
Henry Vaughan

Henry Vaughan? 1622-’95. George Herbert? 1593-1633. It’s enough to make Emily Dickinson and even Shakespeare seem like contemporaries down the road.

I expected Richard Kostelanetz, Dick Higgins, Mark Sonnenfeld, d.a. levy, writers who consciously (very consciously) slap words around with conscious, very intentional anti-logic.

And then one day she told me “I can answer no more than the flower why it blooms.”

But I persisted. The whole truth and nothing but the truth! And finally a letter came through:

Inside my head is a rich, diverse world: a busy,
fascinating world but also the still point of the turning
world.

Wyves of the Fire Dye is guided by actual history
(note the dates, the 40’s, etc.), Secrets to Tell Your
Doll is a little girl whispering her confessional.
One emotion, object, event usually inspires me:
then I plunder my memory bank and look about me,
always start day with prayer (Old Testament or New)
and reading some one else’s writing. I am a lyric and
language poet but the thought process must follow
too: I pray that it follow with flow. Not just flow, not
just follow: the first is mainly heart, the second guided
by head.

So in her two latest books there is a kind of purposeful substrata of organization, but that’s not the point. The point is metaphors / associations, and, then we move into Strongin’s memory bank, the immediate world around her in British Columbia, the Bible and other poet’s work. It would be helpful to have some names here. Canadian poets such as the methaphysical Quebec poet, Anne Hebert, the Catholic Margareet Aison, and the lyrical Gwendolyn MacEwen have been strong influences in Canada. British speech has infused the poet’s work with a new texture, that of early lamplight, moth ball gas lamps, life behind the tweed curtain. Street and place names in Victoria have been juxtaposed upon the American experience for another grist and grain, a counter texture. Some of these names are Capitol Iron on Store Street, Trounce Alley, and Bastion Square. This is the land of pensions where all the English Pigeons have come to roost. Becoming a Mental Londoner is a thing Strongin has admired and sought to become herself, but only in part. The mind is lever but the inner eye, the optic of the poet, is Dutch door: window half open to the sky. Heart, then head. So the fresh unexpectedness isn’t just an inspirational flow, but a carefully thought-out association process.

Let me take a poem, “Transplant,” from a 2008 volume of Strongin’s, The Birds of the Past are Singing, and see how her analysis of her techniques applies:

A town I can nearly transplant
exists in Europe
like a bougainvillea.

The first week of the biggest project, the printer failed
“Announce Printer Works” came.
I had hoped to walk on clouds. Dante in love

lips parted.
My fate, though, was carved in stone.
The racehorse with the highest purse on his head
a silk one
was mine, bending –

flowing in a blond tapestry a Flemish masterpiece
wheat-like with small flowers
nail colors blent with wind. (5)

Comparing a town in Europe to a bougainvillea. No town-time. But the bougainvillea link couldn’t be more unexpected. Then the printer of a book screwed up and she “had hoped to walk on clouds.” Again, the Dante-link totally unexpected. Just like her fate being carved in stone. And what “silk” racehorse are we talking about? I love the pairing-up of silk and racehorse. And then ending with a Flemish tapestry that somehow jumps out at me like she’d described it in thirty lines instead of just being blond, “wheat-like with small flowers / nail colors blent with wind.” Even the use of the word “blent” instead of “blended” gives the poem a more archaic timelessness.

I keep asking her for a confession about the inner dynamics of her poeticizing, and finally a letter comes that says:

Unable to walk, I seek to fly in my poems.
An earthy and ethereal chile combined, I saw myself as boy-girl.

A musical child, I transposed the sung line to the poem.

My mother read me, early, Emily Dickinson.

So ... she brings in the fact that she’s been in a wheelchair for years as a result of childhood polio, and that poetry is a kind of flight into an unfettered reality, an escape into liberating reality.

Only Emily Dickinson. As much as I love Emily Dickinson, I don’t find Strongin’s totally mind-boggling associations in her poetry. It’s all pretty well-united into a unified image-system, lots of nature-references like Strongin, but seldom the visitors from outer (image) space.

Although ... although ... there are rare times when Strongin does come up with a unified, same-image-zone poem.

Like:

Icicles like glass-sculpture line the window:
currant-preserves on the sill’s red as blood of the lamb
the pine extrudes a bead of amber – frozen.

Must life flay like ice?
Yes. That sheer, azure, lean:
When the very skin feels taken to wrap
the beloved in. (6)

What other poetry has she been basking in over the years? Or has she just automatically turned poetry into mobility, turning herself into some sort of fly-everywhere, do-anything creature who travels not only everywhere in Time Present, but travels back to anywhere in Time Past?

Looking a lot closer into her life itself gives us lots of the answers. Her father was a Russian-Jewish psychologist and her mother, from a Romanian ancestry, had acted in gypsy theatre when she was young. Early on she studied composition at the Manhattan School of music and got a B.A. in English and Music from Hunter College, totally immersed in Milton, Spenser and Chaucer.

Polio and the classics:

Paralysis and poetry went hand in hand when polio
left me longing to move other ways: I found this reading
of Raphael’s flight “between worlds & worlds” in Paradise
Lost. Irene Samuel taught the Milton course and was
very inspirational to me. I noted often in life, in myself and
in others, “That certain dashing eagerness of Milton’s
younger angels like Zophiel.” I found those in Spenser’s
pre-fall paradisal gardens and visiting the Cloisters where
again that medieval impulse kicked in, the Cloisters which
house the Unicorn tapestries, in New York ...
Driven by these impulses – music, lyrical poetry,
the Renaissance and Medieval world which haunted
me – I developed early mystical impulses. Music and
mysticism, prayer and poetry, prayer to transcend paralysis
have been drivers.

(From an e-mail, February 24, 2009).

So the atypically modern aesthetics, the mixture of totally unexpected, untraditional elements, the mystical-lyrical originality, are rooted in the classics, with a touch of Jewish and gypsy mysticism: “Death was an early player in the morality play of this life which I often felt, like the Jewish Mystic (as above, so below “mirrors another life” ).

Strangely it sounds very much like my own life, polio as a child, a total immersion in the arts and in religion, almost total separation from the everyday, prayer and poetry....although, to be honest, I find Strongin’s work much more “unexpected,” non-linear than mine. For me she remains the Master Teacher of our times, the incarnation of inspirational freshness, someone to become totally immersed in to the extent that the immersion soaks in and becomes part of your own individual creative mystique.

ENDNOTES

1, “It looked to Us Like Chaos,” from Wives of the Fire Dye, Last Heron Press,
Victoria, B.C., 2008, p.57.

2. Last Heron Press, 2008, “The Back Alleys of Victorian London’s West End,”p.41.

3. “Seeking Reprieve, Reprisal,” Wives of the Fire Dye, p.154.

4. “Seeking Reprieve, Reprisal,” Wives of the Fire Dye, p. 131.

5. The Birds of the Past are Singing, Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick,
New York, 2007, p. 17.

6. “Colorado Winter Kitchen,” The Birds of the Past are Singing, Cross-Cultural
Communications, Merrick, New York, 2007, p. 17.