riverbabble is pleased to present Lynn Strongin as our first Feature Writer. In the past, Lynn had contributed to several issues of riverbabble. During that time, we acquired so much good work we decided the only way to adequately present all of it was in the format of Featured Writer. Lynn spent several days answering questions posed to her through email. Here are the questions and her answers.

LR:  What are you working on now?

LS: Currently, I'm working on a collection of short stories, Cry Me a River, one of which premieres in ths issue of riverbabble. I, also, am working on a portrait of a New York Jewish child, The Gem-Cutter's Child, whose father who is one of the first practicing psychologists in America. I see the psychologist as helping to cut gems; human beings.The aspects of his work which I find closest to my own are the love for a person's story--"Tell me your story," he said to visitors form his deathbed, and his meticulous integrity in keeping things private, and the attention to detail which characterizes psychologist as well as the doctor one more commonly expected to exercise this moral art: the surgeon.

As a child I thought, why are you something whose name is so hard to tell. As an adult, I learn I inherited my story telling abilities from him and from our mother who adored literature and painted in oils her volatile, vivid responses to life on earth.Our home of course was imbued with the cultural lushness, the overspill of books, music, art typical of the European Jewish home in the middle part of the last century.

Two other books which are alterante versions of this story are Indigo: A Poet's Memoir and Obliquities (available on Olivia Dresher's "Life Writing Connection." ) http://www.fraglit.com/lwc/home/

LR:  Whose books are usually next to yours in the bookstores?  In your library?

LS: In bookstores up here in Canada, poets whose surname begins with "S" are near mine normally: Anne Sexton,  Wallace Stevens. At home, anything! I read very widely, in Catholic fashion, quite eclectically and have now, for example, the two volumes of Geroge Eliot's Middlemarch to my right on my writing desk beside the computer. To my left lies W.S. Merwin's Unframed Originals: recollections. Because I am engaged in the lifelong passion of memoir, rewriting no doubt the same stories over and over like Collete.

Since I always begin my writing day with a request for the blessing, and a passage from someone outside my consciousness, today I open to this Foreword to the 1994 Editon of Unframed Originals.

As most children do, I suppose, I took it for granted that the things I saw around me every day had always been just as they appeared when I saw them. That was the way they were. At the same time, I learned quite early that they had come to be from a time before, when they had been different. (p. xiii)

I am always working on cycles of poems, the current one about the Chinese-inspired crisis in the toy industry, "The Toys are Rocking Back on their Heels," profoundly harking back to my own childhood, a half a year of which was spent in a chidlren's ward with polios, spina-bifida cases, and other birth defects children struggled within a converted military hospital at mid-century.

My other two projects are anthologies, to follow in the line of The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy. These are balancing hymns of joy Crazed By The Sun; Ecstatic Poems and Returning The Light: The Hidden Life of Faith in some Contemporary Poets (essays) .

LR:  How much time do you spend on the internet including email?  Is this a blessing or a distraction?

LS: Basically, I chose to make the internet a blessing in my life. Depending on what projects are in the works, I can spend an hour or two at it a day.

LR:  What has been the impact of online magazines to your writing?

LS: While I resisted online reading and publishing initially--I acquired a computer at age sixty, internet at sixty-one--coming to it so late, I had all my techniques tied up with the written word, one letter at a time. During a rather rapid adjustment I have become an afficinoado of the internet and now count on it for lifeblood. It not only brings the world of creativity into my life but, since I am an emigre from the States, living in Canada, it is a live-essential infusion of the language in which I write from all corners of the world. I would be starved, or at best, severely anemic without it now. It is inspiration, creativity, lifeblood and I find the presentation of e-zines and e-chapbooks infinitely various and creative.

LR: What do you think of blogging and do you have a blog? If not, have you considered writing one?

LS: I have no blog and tend to find them scattered, indiscriminate although they too can be a blessing, a visiting a source.

LR: People are aware that you have spent time in a childhood hospital from your writing. Can you speak a bit about this?

LS: Certainly. It absolutely marks me as a child of the Twentieth Century that I contracted the polio virus at age 12, the age it has always been in my mind, when Christ went into the wildneness. At this dozen years of age, a gymnastic girl, I was forced to focus and hone all my sensibilities thru a very fine glass, almost an egg timer thru which the sands of time ran. Paralyzed, I had the opportunity to see and hear clearly. The world moved so slowly for us children that each movement was magnified, seen as it were thru a magnifying glass which gave it terror or tenderness, importance or insignificance. I also sharpened my musician's ear to listen clearly. No doubt this trauma galvanized my art and has been wtih me every moment since informing my sensibiltiey, response, intake of the world.

LR: You emigrated from the States to Canada. How has this affected your work and why the move?

LS:  I have always wanted to live outside my coutnry. I think a writer should. Gertrude Stein and Picasso in Paris are examples which informed me as well, of course, as James Joyce and many of the major Irish writers writing all about Dublin from outside Dublin. A young Canadian reader invited me up and I stayed. 

The infusion of British dialects has italicized my use of language, helping me to see roots of the Anglo-Saxon beginnings which I love for their strength. English is the language I would ask to be reborn into as a poet, the tongue of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Yeats. But who knows? Had I been born into a French speaking language I would adore the French writers that way, also.

LR: Do you still consider yourself an American writer?

LS: Absolutely: my emotional response, the way I attempt to heighten metaphor and language are all American as opposed to British or Canadian. My models are Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, W.C. Williams, Elizabeth Bishop to name a few. They are all poets who compose in the American language. Dickinson may be the greatest of these and the four-lined Hymn which stood at root of her language and vision is most likely the spiritual (I will not call it religious) impetus for much of my metaphor. The Civil War has always fascinated me--a recurring theme like childhood hospitals. This is intrinsically American.

LR: In terms of region, the Northeast's New England colors your poems, the linen mills, the bricked in factories, the very colors (burnt umber, sienna, charcoal grey) are backscape to your poetry. Also, at the other extreme, stands the vision of the American South: divisve, harsh, conflicted, cutting. Can you speak a bit about this?

LS: Certainly, born in New York of a mother from Lynn, Massachusetts, I was driven early thru that countryside dotted with white steeples, farms, churches vivid as lines of poetry or hymns. I home-schooled in New York after my childhood illness, and grew up in the stone canyons. At the same time, earlier experience yet--between ages four and six--plunged me into much travel thru the American south where our daddy, an Army psychologist too valuable to ship to Europe, was posted. His postings shifted frequently so I was in five different first grades. The gnarled emotions, the country to match--magnolias with their small cigarette burns--the torques and torsions of southern poverty, rural speech are forever incised in my brain like an etching, italicized, an entablature as well. Disipline, lyricism, inspiration, dialogue and dialects bequeath the American writer a treasure trove from both regions.

LR: Since Her Side of the Mirror of War is set in the northeast, yet relies on images of the south as well, will you comment a little about the poem?

LS: I have always been fascinated by the Civil War. A poem written in my thirties,"Jonquil" deals with it from various angles. This particular narrative / solliloquy sequence is spoken by the woman narrating from the emotional to the naturalistic world of winter, or, you can say it happens the other way, the world of winter to the heart. She has lost the soldier she loves to the Civil War. Her heart is in civil upheaval. In the first poem, "Ice Crystals Form on the Mirror," like all women, she looks at herself in a mirror and hears coals hiss, coals blue-black like his eyes. For a long time, native New Englander, she led life "straight ahead, brown bread." Now all that is changed. She is remembering. What saturates her memory? Visuals such as "lacy New England sky" which ties her to earth, roots contrasted with the "explosion of a gun." "Last year I had everything," she says. "Lyric, comic, history--legend." Now her daughter Amelia is healing from pneumonia and cousin Jack takes daughter Amelia by train into Amherst. This opening poem is like a letter home, one Emily Dickinson might write:

        Nick is ever so busy:
        I will curl up like a leaf
        draw the season over my head

We are in a locus, given to know she heals in her native Massachusetts, or tries to. "Sorrow" haunts her and horror. The following poem opens up the book of Southern Civil War history. Details italicize the lyrics for me such as "Jeremy," her son given cough syrup barking half the night like a seal, the decay of her country which she won't, like an expatriate, abandon. Her anger threatens to overcome her. She addresses Thomas who last thanksgiving "held her hard" saying he, her lover, went to fight the Southern women who owned her slaves. She is on the Northern side of course. They together stepped into the "ice-crusted" yard. I create as many oval portraits, mirrors, vignettes as the poem will breathe with. Soon we observe the "Southern belles, "velvet glove with iron claw"  selfish, tired / of sewing bandages, baking muffins" and so forth. the slave-like clock-like life of the slave-holder unfolds.

"From that Time Forward," I move the sequence ahead "patriotism, self-sacrifice / won / over the Southern belle." We see her husband change his habits from "service as a common soldier" at which point he wins her heart.

But this widow who remains anonymous. "Meditational Mondays. . .moved in me"  She was "motivated by Misery" like many Civil War Widows to begin writing, abandoning all other plans but obsessed with son Jeremy's lungs clearing in "our Quaker & shaker land." In her loss, she carries on the Quaker stream of prayer and knits "a sock a day for the soldier"  and now, speaking in the present "postwar years, many Confederate women's memoires / describe / woman's dedication" to homespun cloths. She winds up naming names: "The Lack of Candles" is one enigma, conundrum, solved by slaved like "Fanny."

Her final poem is an address to her boy: 'Whatever you look for is right beneath your eyes." Part Two is short beginning with "Mrs Pinkard Hated to Overtake me" in the street and ending with "A Bright eyes Weasel." The widow says, "All is lost / In a second," the bond between seasons buckles, folds too and we end with the "frost" with which we began. A circular poem, it is like a wool weaving, an oval mirror.

LR: One last question. You lived in Berkeley during the Sixties. Can you speak about that a bit?

LS: Berkeley was the right place at the right time. Like Elizabethan England, it was a nest of singing birds. I met Josephine Miles, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Kay Boyle, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley. The very air seemed imbued not just with the mood elevators which the flower children took but with an infatuation with language. There was a freshness to it all. In sight of the campanile of the University of California, able to taste the morning fog, I read the poets afresh and they will forever have infused my love of language with an even greater love while I lived in my small apartment on Stuart Street between Regent and Hillegass. That is where I published my first poems. That is the door to which Denise Levertov came on favored evenings, brown eyes dancing with the light of life, love, language.

I adored Berkeley. I hung out at the Mediterranean Cafe where I met Doug Palmer, Street Poet ("Facino") John Simon and his wife Alta, where I read endless books--my splurge--from the Ram Bam, Moe's, Shakespeare & Co., and Cody's. I met Paul Mariah who introduced me to Robert Duncan and who began "Man Root" magazine. We lived, breathed, dreamed poetry. This was my nonage as a poet after the canyons of New York, the proper rolling hills of New England, and the inspirational chaos of the American South. I imagine that without this inspiration in my late twenties and early thirties I would be a different poet from what I am today.

LR: Thank you, Lynn. Featuring your work has been a great pleasure for us.

Biography
Lynn Strongin (b. New York City, 1939) grew up in New York and various parts of the South where her father was stationed as Army Psychologist. She has lived in Canada for the past 27 years. Will have 12 published books by September, 2006, among them the just-published anthology The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth-Century Elegy, (University of Iowa Press) listed by 'Poetry Daily" among new books, and Dovey & Me (chapbook, can be ordered from Solo Press.org) as well as The Birds of the Past Are Singing (cross-Cultural Communications.) Her fiction has appeared in The Dublin Quarterly, StorySouth, and Confrontation among other journals. One piece was nominated in 2005 for a Pushcart Prize. Work in more than 30 anthologies of poetry, seventy journals, both in print and on-line.