Lyn reading or speaking: her soft, musical, patient yet definitive voice. She knew well the true power of what she was saying/reading but had no need to insist on it. Lyn was, in my knowing her, consistently kind and generous, modest, diligent in everything she did, poetry, criticism and theory, caring for her students, her friends, her family. I have long entertained the hopeful fantasy that poetry could be a path of wisdom. That one could come to serenity and understanding of the human condition by pursuing it for a lifetime. Lyn proved this theory true. Or maybe she was just that way, poetry or no.

I have seen Lyn many times read or introduce readers behind the imposing podium in the Maude Fife room at UC Berkeley. A willowy figure, if that word means light and flexible of frame, with long soft white hair, no makeup, and a wry smile. A smile always nearly present, as if she were having a pleasant time, as if whatever she was saying or hearing was slightly humorous, serious but not to be taken seriously, rather, to be taken with lightness, however serious it may have been. As if everything and anything, when you understood it rightly, was to be taken gently. Her writing also expresses this. It cheers me up.

If you were, like me, involved in the innovative Bay Area poetry scene from the 1970s to the present, you knew Lyn as an anchor, a steady presence, a fixture, a pole star, a foundation, always generous with her reading, publishing, encouragement. Her blurb for my 1985 book The Devices included words, as such things often do, as much about her own work as mine: “Reality is not a fixed or immutable attribute of things but process, a fast and slow unfolding.” The investigation of this unfolding was Lyn’s passion and practice.

I served for many years with Lyn on the board of the non-profit charity Poets in Need, which offers small grants to poets in temporary financial crisis. Lyn’s work for PIN was tireless and extensive—she served as treasurer and secretary—the grunt work of correspondence, banking, fund raising. She did it without complaint or stress, and an uncanny ability to keep things simple. It was a pleasure to work with her. She continued her high level of activity for PIN till almost the end of her life, when she made sure to add good board members to our ranks who would keep up the work that she had so effortlessly performed.

In losing Lyn, PIN has lost its third founding board member. The other two are Michael Rothenberg and Leslie Scalapino, both dear colleagues. For the PIN website, Lyn had this to say about Leslie, her very close friend and collaborator, which I quote here because it is equally about Lyn: “Her generosity to poets was an expression not only of interest but of her ferocious persistence on behalf of something larger than art, though art was central to it… She was engaged—in every facet of her complex and committed life—in a struggle for truth.”