Link: http://www.tayarijones.com/blog/archives/2008/12/rip_pinkie_gord.html

This tribute has been sent to ChickenBones.

Jerry

Angle of Song: Pinkie Gordon Lane (1923-2008)

I am listening to Nia Long deliver the words of ?I Am Looking at Music,? a poem by Pinkie Gordon Lane, on the soundtrack of Love Jones ( Columbia CK67917). I am listening in my mind?s ear to Pinkie being exuberant, voice sparkling like champagne, telling me by phone in 1997 that Nia Long got the poem right in the film, ?even the sniffles.? I am watching in my mind?s eye Pinkie sitting on the staircase in Margaret Walker?s house in 1973, elegant in black; I am listening and watching as Pinkie tells me at a Furious Flower conference in 1994 how happy she had been of late with doing residencies at various colleges, a confirmation that all the effort she had put into writing a dissertation on metaphor at LSU was finally paying off. What was really paying off were the metaphors in her poetry.

Death and the final lines of ?I Am Looking at Music? bring down treasures from the attic of mind:
Secure between fading green covers is the document ?Butler Poetry Festival 1972-1980,? Pinkie?s compilation of all the poetry festival programs at Southern University.

The need to touch something Pinkie touched prompts me to pull out the one for May 3, 1972, the First Annual Black Poetry Festival at Southern University and A.&M. College in Baton Rouge. Yes, I remember. I was on a panel with Charles H. Rowell, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Ruby R. Ennis at 9:00 a.m. in W. W. Stewart Auditorium. Margaret Danner, Don L. Lee, and Ahmos Zu-Bolton were featured poets. Alvin Batiste and the Southern University Jazz Ensemble brought a truth to the line and the curve of sound. That festival was my introduction to Pinkie Gordon Lane and the beginning of a new friendship.

The physics of touch activates other memories. Pinkie and Charles Rowell introduced me to Eugene Redmond, locating me in that dimension where the fact of Pinkie?s transition evokes tales of time. That Miriam Makeba and Odetta walked out the door just ahead of Pinkie is no trivial matter.

The curve and the line of Pinkie?s poetry –all of it — will not release me from 1972 until I say, as I did of her first collection Wind Thoughts that she wrote with passion and stoic grace.
?What is attempted in Wind Thoughts is difficult: to convey weighty experiential insights in simple, unobtrusive language. However, Lane knows the magic of language has control of the subsurface of language. Well-chosen words cluster into powerful image and symbol.?
These words propel me forward twenty-eight years, to 2000 and an elegy for Etheridge Knight and six of its lines:

You left us your songs
to mourn your death
to mourn your life,
to say the prayer that
could not stop your headlong
final plunge.

I make a quicksilver dive to now, quoting my blurb for Elegy for Etheridge:

?Pinkie Gordon Lane?s fifth book of poems is aptly named, drawing attention to the efficacy of ancient poetic modes in the contemporary world. Elegy for Etheridge is more than a pensive song for the literary past; it is a poignant calling for aesthetic and intellectual engagement with everyday life. Lane exploit?s the range of the lyric to aid memory and to guide us into resisting the spell of mechanical response. Her poems enlarge and multiply our perspectives. Their sweep and breadth and flow serve as vivid reminders that ecological and spiritual holocausts consume those who ignore sensibility. Through the colors of language, Lane persuades us to use our being in time and our being in nature wisely, to seek elegiac resolutions.?

I am listening to music, and the angle of Pinkie Gordon Lane?s song bids me to sing
?Farewell, Death. Good morning, Life.?

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 6, 2008