Lisa Orme Bickmore

LISA ORME BICKMORE is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American literature at the University of Utah and teaches literature and writing at Salt Lake Community College. She is the recipient of a Utah Arts Council poetry award and lives in West Jordan, Utah, with her husband, John McCormick, and their five children. Haste, her first collection of poems, was published by Signature Books in 1994. This paper was presented at the Association for Mormon Letters annual meeting, January 22,1994, Westminster College, Salt Lake City.

Review: Helping Us Think and Be in the World Linda Sillitoe. Owning the Moon

Articles/Essays – Volume 51, No. 2

The Lyric Body of Emma Lou Thayne’s Things Happen

Articles/Essays – Volume 32, No. 3

The epigraph to Emma Lou Thayne’s book Things Happen from Alice Walker reads: “One wants to write poetry that is understood by one’s people.” In the same spirit, I want to write to my people about a poet, one of our own, whose poems I believe stand among the finest. Some of these poems I read when they were published ten or more years ago; one, “Love Song at the End of Summer,” has stayed with me all those intervening years, shaping both my readerly and writerly consciousness with its heartbreaking grace. In order to address what I take to be a crucial ontological issue in lyric poetry, Emma Lou Thayne’s in particular, I want to set up a rubric, and to do that I need to talk about my own studies of, and concerns about, the lyric.