At an age when some careers and dreams start winding down, Lucille Broderson took up a pen and found her voice.
Broderson, "a poet of brilliant detail," died Feb. 7, after a writing career that spanned the final three decades of her life. She died, her family reported, "from complications of being 98 years old."
Broderson was in her 60s when she and her husband, Philip, walked into a creative-writing class at the University of Minnesota. But it wasn't her age that made her stand out.
"She was magical," said professor emeritus Michael Dennis Browne, one of Broderson's many admirers in Minnesota literary circles. "She was a natural writer, one of the most natural writers I've met in 45 years of teaching. … She would dip into her memory, into her images and come up with very honest and surprising writing."
She had an ear for the music of the language, he said; as well as the ability to pick out the details "that make poetry a living thing," Browne said, pointing to one of her poems, "Alone at the Old Cemetery," where she threads between children's headstones, past the eroded nose of a stone lamb, toward the graves of two little girls she once knew.
"How I envied them, pretty and blonde, with zipper overshoes, a live father and a white muff," she wrote. "Dead at twelve, drowned. And I envy them still. I'll always envy them."
Broderson kept taking classes, and kept writing. She won a poetry fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts board in 1987. She published two books. Her book of poems, "But You're Wearing a Blue Shirt the Color of the Sky," came out 2010 when she was 94.
She loved the writing process and the excitement of being around other creative people, said her son, Eric Broderson. He remembers watching his mother at a poetry reading at The Loft, reading her works without a trace of nervousness about the size of the crowd before her, all her energy focused on the words.
