Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
George-Thérèse Dickenson (1951–2021)
Poet, editor, and activist George-Thérèse Dickenson died June 15, 2021 in New York. The cause was a brain hemorrhage, according to her brother, John Dickenson.
With Will Bennett, Dickenson edited the magazine Assassin in the late 1970s.
She published two books:
Striations, from Good Gay Poets (Boston, 1976)
Transducing, from Segue (New York, 1986)
George-Thérèse Dickenson was born October 23, 1951, in Napa, CA, daugher of Howard George Dickinson, a lawyer, and Joanne DePuy (maiden name Cardiff), a wine and travel entrepreneur from Altadena, CA. Dickenson was a graduate of Wellesley College. After a brief stint at UC-Berkeley, she moved to Vermont and then Boston in the early 1970s, where she became involved with the anarchist circle around Murray Bookchin. She also connected with a group of poets. In the late 1970s, she moved to lower Manhattan, where, over the next decade, Dickenson was closely involved with Larry Estridge and Peter Seaton. During that time, she taught poetry in the prisons through Janine Pommy Vega’s Incisions Arts Project. Her poems were included in a related anthology, Candles Burn in Memory Town: Poems from Both Sides of the Wall, edited by Vega (Segue/Incisions, 1988). While in New York, she struggled with substance abuse. During Dickenson's last decades, she was living in a mountaintop cabin in a nudist colony in Stockton, NJ. She is survived by her mother and her brothers John and Chuck (pictures above) and her longtime partner Bobby Astarita.