Craft: Besmilr Brigham

Besmilr Brigham (1913-2000) was a fascinating poet from Arkansas. Besmilr is a squished-together phonetic spelling formed from Bess and Miller, which were her given names. Her poems derive from the women’s movement of the 1960s, her Choctaw ancestry, the natural environment of Arkansas, and her travel through Central America and Mexico.

Brigham was born in Pace, Mississippi, and earned a journalism degree from the New School in New York City. Finally, she settled in Horatio, Arkansas where she lived with at least a dozen cats.

Brigham’s first book, Agony Dance: Death of the Dancing Dolls, appeared in 1969, but with only 450 copies printed, they’re very rare. In 1970, she received a Discovery Award from the National Endowment for the Arts and published a second book, Heaved from the Earth, (Knopf, 1971). A posthumous compilation of her work, Run through Rock, was selected and edited by C.D. Wright, who published it through her imprint, Lost Roads Press (now out of print). Finally, a  small number of Gathering Brief Shells by the Sea, a chapbook of 14 poems, appeared in 2023 from Annulet Editions in Iowa City.