Lyn Coffin

Lyn Coffin
Born (1943-11-12) November 12, 1943
Flushing, New York
Occupation Poet, fiction writer, playwright, editor, translator
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Michigan

Lyn Coffin (born November 12, 1943) is an American poet, fiction writer, playwright, translator, non-fiction writer, editor.

Biography

Coffin was born on Long Island, New York. She graduated from Buckley Country Day School in 1957. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan in 1965. She holds an M.A. and an M.S.W. from the (University of Michigan, an M.A.T., Master of Arts in Teaching from Columbia University. She developed a doctoral thesis on the poet James Radcliffe Squires but never defended it to receive her Ph.D.

While a student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she won Major and Minor Hopwood Awards in every category. She was later Associate Editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and taught English at the University of Washington, (Department of Continuing Education), Renton High School through WITS (Writers in the School), the University of Michigan, the (University of Michigan) Residential College, Detroit University, MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Arts and Design), University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia, Jih High School, Marianske Lazne, Czechoslovakia, and Mando Technical Institute, as well as Council House www.councilhouse.org, and The Summit at Capitol Hill.

Coffin is the author of twenty-one books of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, and translation. She has published fiction, poetry and non-fiction in over fifty quarterlies and small magazines, including Catholic Digest and Time magazine. One of her fictions, originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review appeared in Best American Short Stories 1979, edited by Joyce Carol Oates. Her plays have been performed at theaters in Malaysia, Singapore, Boston, New York (Off Off Broadway), Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Seattle. She has given poetry readings with Nobel Prize winners Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz, and Philip Levine, among others. She is a member of Washington Poets’ Association and Poets West and Greenwood Poets. Coffin's latest book is a translation of Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther Skin, a 12th-century epic poem from the country of Georgia. It has been largely unknown to English-speaking audiences because few translations have been produced.

Coffin currently resides in Seattle. She is related to Frederick Coffin (cousin) and Winifred Deforest Coffin (aunt).

Bibliography

Books

Short Fiction

Poetry

Plays

Coffin also translated and adapted Milan Uhde's play Ave Maria, Played Softly for the stage. This was performed at Performance Network Theatre in Ann Arbor, c. 1985.

Essays and articles

Anthologies/Chapbooks

Awards

Exhibitions

Readings and Performances

Style and Literary Influences

Coffin's work is characterized by its focus on interpersonal relationships, specifically romantic relationships between men and women and relationships between family members. In his introduction to Crystals of the Unforeseen, Laurence Goldstein says that her writing, like that of other women writers, often describes "survival and (less often) victory in the war between the sexes."

Coffin is a versatile writer, drawing on multiple genres, and has been recognized for the wide diversity of her works. Her pieces tend to be short; many of the plays are one act in length, and Coffin has written flash fiction and haiku. She clearly enjoys playing with structure—she has written sonnets, acrostics, sestinas, and villanelles—as well as language; her pieces are filled with puns, "one-liners", and a multiplicity of metaphors. Here, Goldstein calls attention to her notable wordsmithing:

"That's what it all comes back to – the timbre of speech, the astonishing succession of tropes that capture our attention. Aristotle said that the talent for figures of speech is the one kind of rhetoric that cannot be learned. And what a pleasure it is to read an author with such mastery over metaphors. The writing sparkles with them:

You know where you’re headed after you arrive – an empty station where a wind like the desert sighing drifts in one door and out the other, and the remains of windows are glass daggers stuck like teeth in wooden gums…

After we arrive at the end of the poem, we appreciate better the thematic function of such images, how they form a network that articulates a capacious vision of human experience. But in the process of reading we simply enjoy them for their originality, their superiority to the quotidian language confronting us on the street, in the office, in front of the TV. And the fiction and plays offer us the same pleasures: "a Slavic accent that had clearly been through a British wringer;" "At night he plies on blankets. I’m keeping you under wraps, he says." "I bet you can’t name me a single red-blooded American guy who had even a fraction of a childhood." One could quote forever the one and two-liners that punctuate Coffin's Crystals of the Unforeseen."

Coffin's writing is sprinkled with literary allusions (the result no doubt of her graduate education and a career spent teaching English). She has said that she "love[s] to muck around in the loam of language" and that she sometimes prefers to begin with "the 'edges' of a poem fixed" by confining herself to a particular form.

Coffin's work contains intimate (and sometimes uncomfortable) revelations and is chiefly focused on inward perception and self-exploration—if not of the author herself, certainly of her characters. Literary influences would include Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but also the confessional poets such as Anne Sexton. Coffin's pieces are frequently autobiographical, drawing on personal experience. In a review for the back of Crystals, Alice Fulton calls attention to "the veracity with which [Coffin] pursues her demons and delights."

The recurring themes to be found in Coffin's writing of death, sex, and mental illness are also typical of the confessional school. For example, in "Me and Me", Coffin describes a suicide:

Looking only in the glass, I put knife to
flesh as pen to paper, drawing a fine line
from shoulder blade to shoulder blade and then
another down the spine. A thin cross of blood
sprang into view and I relaxed, knowing
police would soon be dancing blue attendance.

Coffin's pieces contain many dark notes. Pain is often paradoxically mixed with humor or conveyed in a sing-songy, deceptively childlike voice that is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath. In "Amelia Mealy Mouth", Coffin writes:

When I dreamed, I dreamed I was a doll.
She knew my whole story but she'd only
tell me the start. This is you, she said, You're in
bed. This is Amelia--She looks like me.
You love Amelia for her bright red hair, and
feel sad, but Amelia feels nothing at all.

The images and tone of voice in Coffin's poem "Zombie" are also Plathlike:

...My zombie blood, slick
with oil, sometimes caught fire and burned all night.
I spoke in riddles, and was known to mutter
to myself. At meals, I kept pats of butter
cooling on my tongue like lozenges.

Goldstein writes that Coffin "reads the tradition as one that virtually excludes a woman writer like herself... the situation of the woman writer... is something like the position of women in [her] poems and stories... it is precarious, contingent, often dependent on men for favors." Coffin usually portrays events and people from a woman's perspective, and her work has been featured in an anthology of women's voices.

There is less emphasis placed on plot in Coffin's writing; or, rather, the plot is principally psychological and verbal. There are rarely more than two (central) characters in her poems, stories, and plays, and most of these are driven by interior monologues and searching dialogue or witty banter rather than physical action.

Miscellaneous

Interviews

External links

References

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