Like Newark, Hull also contains a troubled past. A self-described “feral child,”^[8] she was born in Newark on December 5, 1954, and grew up in Upper Montclair. She attended Montclair High School and won a scholarship to Princeton in 1970, but dropped out of high school and ran away at fifteen. As a child, she was always writing or reading, drawing and painting. She was always interested in Newark. Her mother, Christine Hull said: “We would go to Newark and Jersey City once a year around Christmas to deliver food to families in need… she just loved that. Her interest came about with the Newark fires… going to her grandmother’s roof and being totally impressed.”^[8]

Hull’s family moved to New Jersey from Pittsburgh in 1963 and lived variously in Montclair and the Caldwells. Her last years at home were “fragmented by drugs.”^[8] She lived on the streets,^[9] crashed on friends’ sofas, and married a Chinese gambler, an illegal alien. Moving to and from Chinatowns in Boston, New York, and San Francisco, she pursued the marginal, liminal status that would fuel many of the subtexts of her writing: poverty, alcoholism, and heroin addiction.^[10] In adulthood, when she’d return to her hometown, she’d often drive to the hills of upper Montclair — a place where she could see both Manhattan on one side of the view and Jersey and its environs on the other.^[11]

Jauss elaborates on this: “Much of Lynda’s poetry conveys this essential hunger of hers, this desire to feel and understand everything human, no matter how devastating. Perhaps this is why… she seems to glamorize desolation — after all, it is an essential path toward understanding the riddle, toward immersion in the life she felt separate from.” Mark Doty, in the afterword to Hull’s posthumously published third book, The Only World, wrote: “If the difficulty of personal history is glamorized, in these poems, it is because glamour is a way of making history bearable.”

Hull’s poems show a genius of synthesis that interweaves disparate worlds, juxtaposing moments that Yusef Komunyakaa, Hull’s graduate poetry teacher at Indiana University in Bloomington, says: “allude to public history alongside private knowledge.”^[12] These connect to each other in her poetry in several ways: through her compassion for outcasts, mortality, and an understanding that the recognition of human transience is the necessary predecessor to wonderment and a credible appreciation of beauty.^[13] With her alternating currents of attraction and repulsion, Hull attempted to connect Newark’s fraught history — she paid attention to the city’s multiple manifestations of race, class, and gender — to her own battered past. She never saw the publication of The Only World, as she died in a car crash on March 29, 1994.^[14]

Hull’s lyricism offers an artistic inquiry into artistic inquiry. She exists in a rich cultural context of visual artists, jazz musicians,^[15] and photographers who were driven by an impulse to embrace the cities during this period. Wayne Shorter, a tenor saxophonist and composer, perhaps the most famous living musician from Newark said:

“Newark was a hell of a place to learn something about how to survive… a lot of things, whether you were well-off or very, very down in the dregs of poordom. Poordom. There is only a few people from Newark now who are somewhere in the world, imparting their knowledge of survival intelligently, or just daily survival.”^[15]

Hull’s “Love Song during Riot with Many Voices”^[16] uses inventive methods of language to address the state of the city. Hull’s poems, particularly those with an aim to ethically describe urban space, can help us formulate three essential questions: first, will such methods prove to be transferable or even useful in the classroom or even to the city council or citizens of Newark; second, does Hull’s poetry help us to discover what happened in Newark, maybe cognitively; third, does it help us make discoveries that the scientific method simply could not yield?