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Poetry Dynamo Lyn Lifshin - Page 2

© Kay Day

I count Lifshin among the must-reads, but I honestly don't even remember how I discovered her. At times, she has seemed to be everywhere. Her efforts to publish have inspired legions of tales. One of my fellow editors shared a story with me. "I remember getting submissions from Lyn Lifshin years ago when I was co-editor for a now-defunct literary magazine. While most poets sent three to five poems, she sent huge stacks of her work, typed on onion skin. And while most sent us only one packet of submissions for our annual magazine, Lyn sent two or more."

"I'll admit," my colleague continued, "I hated wading through her reams of material, but the caliber of her work was so much higher than most of what we received, it was well worth the effort. I also remember being envious that she had so much material to submit in the first place..."

Submitting can be a challenge to any poet, regardless of talent. Lifshin says the part of the business she finds tough is the "networking." "Some people are great at this, love it." she writes. "I'd rather be writing." She has a new book, Before It's Light, coming from Black Sparrow Press this fall, and confides, "I'll work at doing as much as I can to publicize it." But Lifshin, the consummate writer, adds, "The writing is always the high--"

One of the first poems I discovered by Lifshin, "Getting My Mother Ice," from the collection, Cold Comfort explores the mother-daughter relationship that draws words from so many female poets. The poem that begins, "Nothing lasts long/in this heat/except the dark/of waiting..." probes feelings between a critically ill parent and her daughter-caretaker. The reader receives a snapshot of the daughter getting a wash cloth for her parent, and is caught up in the hopelessness of the situation. In an article for Writer's Digest, Lifshin called poetry a "way to hold, to keep a moment, like photographs..."

Asked about her interest in the mother-daughter bond, Lifshin replied, "I agree that the mother and daughter relationship is so intense, interesting, and ambivalent that an incredible number of strong poems on the subject exist. That was why I chose that relationship for the first anthology I edited, Tangled Vines, and that has been kept in print almost without a break."

Lifshin calls the present "a comparatively quiet (catch up) time for me before the publication of my next book-and all the work in trying to arrange readings etc. around that...I still have about 100 handwritten notebooks of poems to catch up on." She says she has thought about a novel, but she hasn't done it yet. As a Lifshin fan, I'll be watching the shelves, because after experiencing what she does with poetry, the novel should be a piece of cake.

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