Lynda Hull

Lynda Hull Poems

Lynda Hull Biography

Lynda Hull (December 5, 1954 – March 29, 1994) was an American poet. She had published two collections of poetry when she died in a car accident in 1994. A third, The Only World (Harper Perennial, 1995), was published posthumously by her husband, the poet David Wojahn, and was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award. Collected Poems By Lynda Hull (Graywolf Press), was published in 2006. Hull was the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council, and received four Pushcart Prizes. Her poems were published widely in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, AGNI, Colorado Review, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry. Hull was born and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. At the age of 16 she won a scholarship to Princeton University, but ran away from home. During the next ten years she struggled with heroin addiction on and off and lived in many places including various Chinatowns following a marriage to an immigrant from Shanghai. In the early 1980s Hull started studying at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and earned her B.A., and then her M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. She also reconnected with her family during this time and met the poet David Wojahn, whom she married in 1984. She taught English at Indiana University, De Paul University, and in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She served as a poetry editor for the literary journal Crazyhorse (magazine), which offers an annual award in her honor, the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. In his review of her Collected Poems, Craig Morgan Teicher described Hull's poetry as, "lush, intensely lyrical evocations of the underbelly of American urban life, driven by a sense of inevitable loss and degradation but also by a powerful attachment to momentary beauty." In a 2008 interview with Gulf Coast, David Wojahn said of her study and work, "She steeped herself in the Romantics, especially Keats and Shelley, and she knew Hart Crane almost by heart. I’m still in awe of that acuity, and of how she used it to do honor to a broken world, post-apocalyptic, filled with ruins and ruined lives. And she gave such dignity to that landscape and those lives. She really did have an incredible lyric gift, one that no other poet of my generation possessed." Poet David St. John wrote that “Of all the poets of my generation, Lynda Hull remains the most heartbreaking, merciful, and consoling.)

The Best Poem Of Lynda Hull

Chinese New Year

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows
pasted with colored squares, past the man
who leans into the phone booth's red pagoda, past
crates of doves and roosters veiled

until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets
with sulphur as people exchange gold
and silver foil, money to appease ghosts
who linger, needy even in death. I am

almost invisible. Hands could pass through me
effortlessly. This is how it is
to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows
untranslatable as the shop signs,

the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle
in the stairwell, the corridor where
the doors are blue months ajar. Hands
gesture in the smoke, the partial moon

of a face. For hours the soft numeric
click of mah-jongg tiles drifts
down the hallway where languid Mai trails
her musk of sex and narcotics.

There is no grief in this, only the old year
consuming itself, the door knob blazing
in my hand beneath the lightbulb's electric jewel.
Between voices and fireworks

wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush—
no language I want to learn. I can touch
the sill worn by hands I'll never know
in this room with its low table

where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign
for Jade Palace sheds green corollas
on the floor. It's dangerous to stand here
in the chastening glow, darkening

my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest
of my life widening away from me, waiting
for the man I married to pass beneath
the sign of the building, to climb

the five flights and say his Chinese name for me.
He'll rise up out of the puzzling streets
where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where
the new year is liquor, the black bottle

the whole district is waiting for, like
some benevolent arrest—the moment
when men and women turn to each other and dissolve
each bad bet, every sly mischance,

the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight
the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway.
He brings fish. He brings lotus root.
He brings me ghost money.

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