The poet, who wrote for many years in obscurity, “kept small stacks of paper in every room of the farmhouse — just in case. She wrote whenever the rhymes blossomed: sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes at the chirp of dawn, sometimes in the summer fallow tractor, where she’d draw a finger across the dusty windshield. She started with a single line, a single rhyme, and ‘then you have to fill in all this other garbage,’ she once said, with the sort of dry, self-deprecating humor that often infused her verse.”