Jason Sanford: Your father worked with injured soldiers in the Southern United States during World War 2. What was it like for a Jewish family in the South during that time? What memories of that time period continue to stick with you today?
Lynn Strongin: I was four years old when we moved south, outside Miami during World War II. Later, I learned that our father worked with the most extreme cases of injury: trauma, what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, bipolar disorder, and shellshock.
He wore khaki, an olive drab that haunted me for life. The South was bathed in a half-light, dim. I saw poverty: corrugated rooves, people on front porches. Aware of being Jewish I thought WWII was being fought against us. Living on the edge of the ocean I feared that the Nazis would cross from Europe to us and attack. When a plane flew low, I fell to the ground in terror. We were a small Jewish family with European background living totally out of our element, the element I was born into: New York City. The South was strange, haunted and in its dusky way, beautiful.
When I lived later in the deep South, Sarasota, for my parents to divorce—adultery was the only valid cause in NY state—the torque occurred between being a Jewish girl of nine thrown in with Christian girls my age. I could not say with belief, ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag…’ If I wasn’t standing on the rim, I took up too much space; even then. We moved back north, I caught polio, one of the last to. I recalled Mrs. Meizenheimer whom we called ‘Rats,’ one of the tough love nurses who were battleaxes left over from WWII and woke us kids at five a.m. There is Lesbian love here as well. And androgyny; I was a girl-boy I felt. It is an old South I imagine I write of. These poems dedicated to Jake Adam York I hope carry the swing and bling of a kid who was a child-civil-rights fighter, on the outside of the circle several ways, late 1940’s – 1951, while the ground in Europe was still smoking.
(Editor’s note: Strongin’s comment about Jake Adam York refers to the late poet and poetry editor of storySouth, who published Strongin’s writings in the magazine and to whom her new poems in this issue are dedicated.)
Sanford: In the 1960s, you moved to Berkeley and became an early advocate for disability rights. Could you please describe some of the work you did during this time period? How did your advocacy intersect with both your writing and the larger literary community?
Strongin: Berkeley was the place to be during the sixties. Vibrant, the coffeehouses containing a world of their own. The Mediterranean was my second home: I haunted it, met other poets like street poet Julia Vinograd, Dough Palmer also a street poet who wrote poems for people similar to the way artists sketched portraits. The sweet smell of pot hung in the air. Peoples’ Park was owned by the University of California but taken over by Hippies, a great rebellion ensued at the same time Mario Savio was one of the initiates of the Free Speech Movement on the steps of Sproul Hall. Lawrence Ferlenghetti, who ran City Lights Bookstore, put together an anthology of poets who protested the University’s quelling of those who used People’s Park as a small tent city. It was, after all, not being used in the least by the University. Soldiers were called in and stood on street corners with unsheathed bayonets. I remember one fellow went up to a soldier and kissed him on the lips. The protest was followed by the much larger, international movement for the French Students who were rebelling. A reading was set up by Denise Levertov and others, a reading for which Elizabeth Bishop flew over from Brazil, Muriel Rukeyser came from New York. It was made fun of by one hippie who dressed in pink fur and jumped up and down on the stage calling himself the “‘Peoples’ Prick…”
This is what it was like to be a poet in Berkeley in the sixties. I met friends of Robert Duncan and was invited to his circle of gay poets in San Francisco where he shared an old house with Jess, the collagist, his partner for life. So much endorsement of the poetry written at that time led to much writing which was not good. Most art in any age is bad. But it also led to a faith in oneself. For instance, sitting beside Charles Olson who occupied two chairs; who sent out repeatedly for a six-pack, instilled in me a joyful spirit of being outside the mainstream. It was in Berkeley during that magical decade of the sixties that I came out as a poet. I was becoming part of a literary community. And I loved it.
Sanford: Your writings in the 1960s and ’70s were strongly connected with second-wave feminism and were published in such famous anthologies as Sisterhood Is Powerful and I Hear My Sisters Saying. What were the feminist and academic communities like for you during this time period?
Strongin: I entered the second wave of feminism largely unaware of it being a wave, or feminism, after winning a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing grant the winter I moved to New Mexico, 1971. It occurred to me that the men in the English Department had a certain cold shoulder attitude toward me after the local paper announced the prize.
That’s when I wrote “Sayre (Woman Professor)” with the line “She wore olive drab all that autumn.” The image was of an older woman professor, a closet Lesbian although I never used that word.
At the same time, I wrote “First Aspen: For a young woman painter.” I called her Alex.
“Young girl, you have made life
joyful again.”
Whereas Sayre wears olive drab, implying a handsome androgynous person, the woman painter is absolutely the other side of the mirror and the coin, and brings joy into life.
I didn’t know this was the second wave of feminism following Betty Freidan and The Feminine Mystique. But apparently it was. We had staked our claim. In an earlier poem “Paschal Poem” published in Ron Schreiber’s 31 New American Poets (Hill & Wang 1960), a poem Denise Levertov had read when first published, in this earlier poem I voiced a feeling I had always had: I was a girl, I was boyish.
A boy walks through the flaming sky:
What is it to be so slender boy?
To walk the flaming field at duskTo be so careless of the evening’s beauty
Is to be a beauty of the evening wholly.
I didn’t intend “wholly” as a pun but subconsciously I felt it. Levertov marked on the side, “This is a persona then.”
In my eighties, were I to return and look down from the terrace of my second-floor apartment in Berkeley in the sixties, observing that same pain field I am sure I would feel the same thing: carelessness of beauty is beauty itself. I am that boy walking the dirt field. I have in fact returned once to look down upon that field: I felt the same way. Watching this kid also brought back my walking days to me, so had that sanctified by-spirt-feeling of something deeply loved and lost forever.
I did, however, live outside community
It was of key necessity to me to develop this vision by myself: of being androgynous, of being envied in a low-keyed way, carrying a lamp inside me which would light the path ahead. But then my mother had once held my face close to her and said, ‘You, you’re not of this world. You’re something else.”
Advocating for peace in Southeast Asia was my strongest protest; feminism, architectural and social obstacles to disabled people were strong but it was as a Pacifist I faced tear-gas, incarceration.
Living in the desert gave me the heightened awareness of this, also it gave me the freedom to be a voice in the wilderness with joy, abandon, discovery and the clarity of mind that guides.
Sanford: How do you feel your writing has changed over the decades? Do you find your focus different today than when you first started publishing your poetry?
Strongin: Over the decades, my writing had become more of what it began as: lyrical, descriptive, emotional.
One image that recurs is the enclosure: in Dovey & Me, the first-person narrator lives in a beach-hut, swept by sand, again at the rim of a body of water: a bay strewn with logs. It is located North in Canada’s British Columbia. It is an I / Thou cycle kin to “First Aspen,” but this time addresses an unnamed older woman, not one who “makes life joyful again” but one who demonstrates the wisdom of age; the struggle of being poor and the odds of age against her. Once again, it can be read as a Lesbian love poem.
My recent book Kiosk also is anonymous: once again, an old woman is speaking. She has lived in a kiosk battened down by old snow and rain sodden newspapers, a kind of husk like Dove’s, located in my mind in Central Park. A kiosk, a beach hut all hark back to that beach on the Atlantic Ocean where we lived, a small family, on the edge of war. I have written in cycles, such as The Dwarf Cycle, Dovey, Kiosk, beginning with a misfit who wears his “neck brace” in cold desert weather, winter coming on. The misfit on the edge would be taking up too much room if not standing on the brink.
Olive-drab has turned into battered gold like the WW II tinsel dropped by the enemy over London which children turned into tinsel for holiday celebration. I have felt myself turned inside out: by the isolation of the South early, the elation of the joyous, rebellious atmosphere of Berkeley in the sixties, and finally by the Kiosk of age in the North in my eighties. Olive drab finally turns into the radiance of beaten metal whether gold, copper, or bronze. There are hammer marks of experience. There is the light inside of the voice.
The hull of the kiosk does not sail but the news of the world anchors it in a liquid way. All has been an evolution as well as a continued dominance; for the disabled to be able to partake of life whether living in the womb-like enclosure of a sandy hut, a time-battered kiosk, covered by newspapers which carry the news of the world. Poems do not carry news of earthly concerns, but without what they convey one would die as William Carlos Williams says.
I am engrossed by writing eleven line modern sonnets; three triplets, ending with a couplet. A circle has come full arc from my earliest memory when WWII raged thru midlife. What is happening today in Ukraine has precedent. Khaki returns to battle the gold and blue silks of a once sovereign country. Equally breath-taking, horrific the battles at home where children go to school with bullet-proof backpacks, mothers writing in controlled fear ‘Love you’ on wrapped sandwich paper.
Silence is as crucial in music as sound. The rests count, for chiaroscuro. So, I take an overview of my work and its evolution. I began consciousness aware of the piano my mother practiced before I was born. I kicked violently when she played Beethoven. On the beach outside Miami in between fears of war there was the silence of the sand. In Berkeley came a joyous burst of energy, rebellion, light. Finally, up North I have found the resolution of the cocooned first-person voice of Kiosk.
From early on, after the clamor, the crescendos and great hurrahs alternate with the deep dives into love and grief, I fought a lifelong battle with a now extinct disease; following the losing battles with the body, Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, always watching it roll back down: (From silence one comes—to it, returns.)
Sanford: Bounds Out Of Bounds: A Compass For Recent American and British Poetry said that “It may be as disturbing to read Strongin’s poems as it is to endure life at certain times. But because they confront and transcend life’s bonds so boldly the reader feels a breathtaking sense of clarity and freedom.” How important is it to confront the pain and illness in all our lives? Why do so many people in the world try to pretend that they are somehow immune to pain and illness?
Strongin: Nobody is immune to pain and sorrow. We inherit it with the cry that signals birth. By the age of twelve, 1951, I had gone thru three traumas; World War II, my parents’ divorce, finally polio. The poet, the lens is always the human condition. So, pain and suffering. Why do people run away from these. . .because they are difficult, unknown?
While around me I saw people in denial, they were shaded by those—young and old—who embraced the inevitable as they must. I saw this as a hospitalized child, felt it so strongly that when I was discharged from a ward of kids after half a year, I missed their spirit, their gutsiness. We children might have seemed shadows, but our spirit was the sculpture which cast the shadow.
Sanford: You published a number of works in The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States. How important was that magazine to people back in the day? What was it like working with the magazine?
Strongin: It was enormously hard agreeing to publish in The Ladder. The late Barbara Grier worked in Missouri, for the Dictaphone corporation, but her life was The Ladder. She urged me over and over to give her some of my poems. Fearful of losing my teaching job, I deferred but finally gave in with some lyrics from The Rose Poems. I had faith in the work but didn’t want to be slotted. My relationship was more with the hide and seek with Grier than with her journal.
Bravely, in what she dubbed ‘the pragmatic, flat-footed middle west,’ she forged ahead with her mission. She wrote me ‘If my poor judgment is right, you are going to be one of the gods.’ Disabled, on modest means, far from home, these words gave me a sense who I was, could become; luminous.
Sanford: You have published in literary and small magazines for more than sixty years. How have these magazines changed over the years? Are there any literary or small magazines you particularly miss?
Strongin: Little magazines grew like ivy in Berkeley; The Goliards, Thorp Springs Press and a multitude of others. People’s Park inspired Lawrence Ferlinghetti to cull an anthology Green Flag. I sent in the poem “Nell” which I can see as a companion to “Ascent.” The compassion, without which I cannot live, is evoked in this poem too which uses the analogy of poet as carpenter, asking the greater carpenter to sand the planks of her soul. These are the little magazine I miss.
Thorp Springs Press, the late Paul Foreman’s child, was key in Paul publishing my first chapbook The Dwarf Cycle, after I had moved from Berkeley to New Mexico. The small book received acclaim from Bob Peters. Josephine Miles had a genius for cordiality; she was the hub; with her wide smile, her house on Virginia Street was open to young poets; Aart Sze and others. Matchmaking with her mischievous smile was her delight. Thorp Springs went on to publish my second chapbook, Shrift; a sequence of winter poems. The spare, bare bones of winter enchant me. Late in life, in Canada, Paul again published two books of mine still under the imprint of Thorp Springs, his home in Texas. Cape Seventy is a full-length book of poems; Indigo is an autobiography.
Confrontation published my “New England Love,” which Denise Levertov nominated for the collection of best of the year. Like Miles, Levertov was enormously generous to young poets she admired.
Sanford: There was a gap in your published poetry from the 1980s through the 1990s. May I ask why?
Strongin: The gap in my writing occurred when I moved to Canada. I had always wanted the perspective of living outside my homeland. Changing countries is going thru a fire. I now lived where old Scottish voices charmed me, where Antique Row shimmered in the ongoing rains of November. It was a shock that woke me up. Comfort zone is not really a term in my vocabulary. Here, however, I was jolted out of the known to the illuminating, at times otherworldly realm of the new, the unknown. I wrote like ever, in blazes, but did not combine the effort to immigrate for a Canadian photographer I love and some health issues, some health problems and the effort to adjust.
So now in my mid-eighties I feel the arc of my life which began in the deep South, connecting with the winter of my life, North of where I grew up, austere, lonely at first but at last accepting, illuminating, inspiring the second half of my life writing.
(Editor’s note: At this point Strongin referenced two lines from “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go.”)
Sanford: For you, what joys and pains are revealed by a life deeply connected with poetry and writing? What has your poetry and writing brought into your life and created in your life?
Strongin: Poetry and writing has given voice to deepest feelings. Read, read, read and listen is my only suggestion to all poets. Favorite poets of mine are Sappho, Rumi, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Vaughan, Marvell, the English metaphysical poets. Contemporary poets I have re-read and found inspiration from are Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Wright, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Vassar Miller, Nelly Sachs, Mandelstam, and so many others I am sure to neglect some in this brief list. There is a sweep, culminating in the music of this world’s poetry that culminates in the wave of my life writing.
LS September 30, 2023
Victoria, British Columbia
