Dr. Pinkie Gordon Lane -African American Poet Laureate of the state of Louisiana

Pinkie Gordon Lane

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Photo Credit: Louisiana State University Press

Dr. Pinkie Gordon Lane (January 13, 1923 to December 3, 2008) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to William Alexander Gordon (d. 1940) and Inez Addie West Gordon (d 1945). She was the youngest of 4 children, but the only one to live beyond infancy. She attended the Philadelphia School for Girls, graduating in 1940. Lane left her job in a sewing factory in 1945 to enter Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, where in 1949 she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and art, and began teaching in the public schools of Georgia and Florida (1949-1955). It was during her senior year at Spelman that she met and married Ulysses Simpson Lane (d. 1970) in May 1948.

In 1955 she returned to Atlanta and began working on a master’s degree in English from Atlanta University. Upon receiving her degree in 1956, she and her husband left Georgia and moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she took a teaching position at Leland College in Baker, La. from 1957-1959. She left Leland to accept a position as instructor of English at Southern University (Baton Rouge, La.). In 1963 she gave birth to her only child, a son, Gordon Edward Lane.

In 1967, Lane became the first African American woman to receive the Ph.D. degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. While continuing her professional development at Southern University, she was promoted to full professor and served as Director of the English department from 1974 until her retirement in 1986.

Lane’s literary career began in 1956 when she found some success as a short story writer. She decided upon poetry as her chosen medium and her first published poem appeared in Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture in 1961. In addition to her numerous publications in periodicals, she has published 5 books of poetry: Wind Thoughts (1972), Mystic Female (1978), I Never Scream: New and Selected Poems (1985), Girl at the Window (1991), and Elegy for Etheridge (2000). She has served as editor or contributing editor to anthologies and periodicals such as Poems by Blacks (1973), Discourses on Poetry (1972), Callaloo, and Black Scholar.

Lane has traveled globally, participating in numerous workshops, seminars, and poetry readings throughout the United States, Africa, the Virgin Islands, and Haiti. She has held positions as director of the Melvin A. Butler Poetry Festival, 1974-80; Louisiana State Poet Laureate, 1989-1992; Louisiana Black History Hall of Fame inductee, 1991; Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of Northern Iowa, 1993-94; and Du Pont Scholar, Bridgewater College, 1994. (Bio: Louisiana State University Library)

Elegy for Etheridge
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Paperback: 74 pages
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (April 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0807125458

In Elegy for Etheridge, Pinkie Gordon Lane embraces the reader with a heartfelt invitation to shared human experiences. She quietly observes the panorama of life that surrounds us all, writing of family and friends, trees and owls, the exploitation of women on welfare, and the devastation of the natural environment. In so doing, she acknowledges the most intimate agenda of our lives, loves, and losses.

Although Pinkie Gordon Lane is a native of Philadelphia, the metaphorical imagery in her poetry—the primary component of her literary style—is inspired by the southern landscape, especially Louisiana, her home for over forty years. A sense of loss permeates this engaging collection, loss of both loved ones and of love. In “Songs to the Dialysis Machine,” Lane assumes the voice of her late husband, who—in the years before his death—depended on the device that “sucks the life-flowing blood / and sends it back / as a promised gift.” “Love Poems: Epitaph for the Blues” speaks of the pain and guilt—though not unmixed with joy—that pervade an illicit love affair: “Darkness gathers brightly / and my demon starlets dance / like tinseled ghosts on a saint’s night.” In the title poem, Lane laments the passing of black poet Etheridge Knight, who spent many of his years in prison.

Lane’s melodic verses beg to be read aloud, to be set to music. Her lyrical elegies affirm the late critic and poet Stephen Henderson’s assessment of her work as “a crucial reminder that we can’t afford to sacrifice any of our experience.”

Girl at the Window
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Paperback: 54 pages
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press (November 1991)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0807117145

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. Take, for example, a stanza from a suite of poems about the city of Baton Rouge:

Living in Baton Rouge is like
living in the hollow of nowhere.
It is like disappearing into the
night, like darkness, like sun,
like beauty, like song,
like knowing you are
surrounded only by your “self,”
like pouring your loneliness
into a great pool of
light.

The poems of family and friendship are just as strong in their ability to embrace and celebrate paradox. Images of wind and seasonal change simultaneously ground the poems in nature and keep them constantly in flux.

Lewis Simpson, former editor of the Southern Review, has called Girl at the Window “a distinctive achievement in African-American lyric poetry.” Pinkie Gordon Lane’s fourth volume of poetry is also a “survival song/ a hymn of spirit,” in her words “survival Poem,” and a remarkable achievement in the poetry of personal history.

I Never Scream: New and Selected Poems
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Paperback: 104 pages
Publisher: Lotus Press (MI); 1st edition (May 1985)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0916418588

Mystic Female

Wind Thoughts
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Unknown Binding: 59 pages
Publisher: South and West, inc (1972)
Language: English
ASIN: B0006CH0JQ

Related Links

Pinkie Gordon Lane Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/findaid/4629.htm

Jerry Ward Jr. Remembers Pinkie Gordon Lane
http://eisaulen.com/blog//index.php/2008/12/06/guest-blog-jerry-ward-jr-remembers-pinki

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