I feel her searching for le mot propre, for the precise word or image that will convey the pain of death. (“I write to come to terms with pain, or to dissipate it,” she explains.) She lost her father, a “poor wild, sad, raging / creature who had forgotten / how to love,” when she was only seventeen, her mother died when she was twenty-two, and her husband, who underwent dialysis and an unsuccessful surgery, left her a widow while she was still a young woman. Death, then, is a central theme in her work, and the elegy is one of her most significant forms, as the following poems indicate: “Marion, an Elegy,” written on the death of a nineteen-year-old friend, “To a Female Poet That I Know,” commemorating the death of Sarah Webster Fabio, and  “Elegy,” for her husband, Ulysses Simpson Lane, known as Pete.

One of her most beautifully crafted works is “Elegy for Etheridge,” the title poem of her last collection, published in 2000, which was occasioned by the death of Etheridge Knight (1931-1991), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Poems From Prison, Belly Songs, and Born of a Woman. “When he died of cancer, that poem seemed to just float out,” Lane explained in a 1999 interview with John Lowe. She begins her elegy with lines 1-5 and 21-22 of Knight’s “Another Poem for Me (after Recovering from an O.D.)” from his Born of a Woman, and, throughout the elegy, she quotes lines from other poems of his and alludes to titles, topics, and figures from his work. The first three stanzas, written in the third person, evoke the almost mythic life of the troubadour, the prison knight, who created spirited songs and journeyed through life with total abandon, but, in the nine stanzas that follow, the poet addresses Etheridge by name, using his lines about silence, a dance of death, and a mother’s prayer to conjure up his own demise, his self-destructive “headlong / final plunge.” In lamentation, she writes:

Her verses capture the spirit of the man poet whose work she admired and whom she came to know through the Melvin Butler Black Poetry Festival at Southern University, which she directed for seven years, and through their joint appearance at a nine-week poetry seminar in Port Townsend, Washington. Although Knight is associated with the Black Arts Movement, as are Sonia Sanchez, Lane’s friend, and Gwendolyn Brooks, her spirit mentor, the Louisiana Poet Laureate resisted the political agendas of other poets, although her later poems, including “Nuclear Peril,” “Environment Poem,” and “Sexual Privacy of Women on Welfare” reflect a deep concern for social and environmental issues.

Pinkie Gordon Lane’s poetry is intensely personal but also profoundly universal, because she writes of experiences—death of a parent and a lover’s abandonment—that touch the heart. Her love lyrics are exquisite, and perhaps the most beautiful of these is “Love Poems: Epitaph for the Blues,” a long meditative poem, divided into twenty-one parts, like the movements of a symphony, parts that trace the evolution of a love affair from “Awakening” to “Healing.” She first called it “Love Song of an Outcast” and, later, “Elegy for the Blues,” because it deals with an extramarital affair, but she explained in the Lowe interview, “I don’t identify with my being an outcast, but I call them the blues because they are unhappy love poems.” The language is simple, unadorned, unembellished; the sparse images describe familiar elements of nature such as spring blossoms and singing crickets; and the epigraphs of writers like Leroi Jones and Joyce Carol Oates are connected, thematically, to the verses that follow. 

In this quiet poem, Lane writes of silence and sleepless nights, of soft light and listening shadows, of bright-eyed fear and a troubled mind. In lines like these

she reveals skillful craftsmanship and a keen poetic sensibility in her use of plain language and in her juxtaposition of a simile drawn from nature and allusions to two avant-garde poets. Her verses are inspired by simple objects (an owl or a photograph) and events that she reads about in the newspaper (an oil spill in Alaska or the rape of girls in Bangladesh), as well as her work as a poet (“Port Townsend Poems”) and as a college professor/administrator (“On Being Head of the English Department”). Most important, she creates beauty out of despair and loneliness, makes music from night calls and wind songs, and paints canvasses of red earth and purple bayous. Like the girl at the window

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Pinkie Gordon Lane, Louisiana’s poet laureate, has created in Girl at the Window a volume of poetry stitched together by love of place, love of language, and love of family, a volume both intimate and generously welcoming. The logic of the poems is lyrical, rather than narrative, but this poet’s lyric is large enough to include a five-year-old child’s memory of violence, a trip to the bootlegger’s with a father likened to Ulysses, and in a prose poem, memories of a mother who “tumbled around in the tight little from of a house in North Philadelphia, guarding its walls fiercely, as if they belonged to the Smithsonian.” Her eye is unflinching, but through precision of language and daring emotional leaps, Lane locates beauty even within troubling prospects.

Pinkie Gordon Lane, professor of English emeritus at Southern University, was the first black woman to receive the Ph.D. from Louisiana State University and in 1989 was named the first black poet laureate of Louisiana. Her poetry has appeared in the Journal of Black Poetry, the Black Scholar, the Southern Review, Nimrod Callaloo, and Ms. Magazine. She has given lectures, readings, and workshops throughout the United States and in Ghana, Cameroon, and Zambia. LSU

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posted 5 February 2009