Lynda Hull's Collected Poems (Thank You to Mark Doty)

In 2007 I had the good fortune to participate in a workshop led by Mark Doty. Among the poems Mark provided as examples to consider was "Shore Leave" by Lynda Hull, a poet (among so, so many) whose work I did not know. I still recall vividly feeling a surge of amazement as we read through the poem.

One of my favorite poems by Mark Doty is "White Kimono" from Sweet Machine. I never knew who the Lynda in this poem was, and so I was fascinated to learn more about her relationship and friendship with Mark.

Having introduced her in the workshop, Mark went on to explain that Lynda's poetry (which had fallen out of print) had recently been reissued as the first in a series from Graywolf Press for which he is the Series Editor. I went directly to Amherst Books and purchased my copy, which has been more or less continuously in my backpack ever since.

I tend with music and poetry to listen and read things I enjoy over and over and over. Beck's Sea Change and Pearl Jam's Riot Act . . . Source by Mark Doty and since last year Lynda Hull's Collected Poems. While I don't encourage such obsessive rereading and listening, I do encourage poetry lovers to get a copy of Lynda's (and Mark's) poems.

To get a sense of the work, the American Academy of Poets site has a representative selection of Lynda Hull's poems. Among the seven featured here, personal favorites are "Fiat Lux," "Lost Fugue for Chet" and "Ornithology." Really, though, it's hard to pick favorites . . . every poem has wonderful language, emotional intensity, crazy inventiveness, and passages of lyrical nirvana.

One poem from the Collected Poems which I've not found online but which is also among my favorites follows:

Abacus

No grand drama, only Chinatown's incendiary glow,
me returning to the old delinquent thrill of us

passing through this jimmied door, the herbalist's
shop gone broke & latticed with accordion grille.

Are these faces of ours oddly gentled, First Husband,
as evening's verge spills over bad-news gang-boys

filling vestibules with their bored sangfroid, over
old women smoothing newsprint sheets for carp steamed

to feathers of flesh? Two doors down, the gold-toothed
Cantonese lifts her tray of pastries streaming

red characters for sweet lotus, bitter melon, those
for fortune, grief, for marriage & rupture.

In my wallet, the torn wedding picture sleeps---
your brilliantine & sharkskin, my black-brimmed hat,

a cluster of glass cherries. Too young. Words roil
to calligraphy above us, cold as the dawn

your second wife wakes to, day-old rice then scorched
fluorescence through sweatshops, through bobbins

& treadles, the 6 cent piecework. When it's time,
we'll exchange a formal kiss in the whorling updraft

of burnt matches & apothecary labels, gang graffiti
slashed upon the walls. Why return to this empty shop

where I'd meet you sometimes after-hours over poker,
men chanting numbers in a sinuous grammar of 40-watt light

& smoke? Not much here now, a few drafty rooms, broken
drams of pungent White Flower Oil you'd rub my feet with,

bruised from dancing six sets a night between the star acts.
Not much, but what I choose to shape sleepless nights

far from here, when I'm diaphonous, engulfed again
by Chinatown's iron lintels, the hiss & spill of neon fog,

heliotrope & jade unrolled against the pavement I'd walk
in filmy stockings, the impossible platform shoes. As if

I might find her here again, my lost incarnation fallen
from the opulent emptiness of nightclubs, those

restaurants tuxedoed in their hunger. No one could
translate such precise Esperanto. And so we linger

tiny, surviving protagonists briefly safe here
from the crowd's ruthless press, a fanfare

of taxis polishing the avenues. Whenever next
I meet you, I'll meet you here in the harsh

auroral radiance of the squad car's liquid lights.
Things have never been so essential. I have seen

businesses fold & open like paper lilies, & men
leave for Hong Kong, then return to lie down

again in crowded rooms, the way each of us
lies down with a lacquered maze of corridors

& places where those once loved unbearably wear
strangers' faces. You run your hand through the hair

you've dyed black to hide the gray & out
on the street, sweet-faced vandals arabesque

caught in a rain of trinkets, green cards, the lucky
one-eyed jacks. Beneath my fingers, the twisted

braille fo hearts & knives incised upon
the counter works its spell until the herbalist

takes up his abacus once more to commence
the sum of unguents, of healing roots,

a measure of time, a calculation beyond all worth.