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Linda Gregg

Visiting Poet

Linda Gregg

Restlessly seeking but attentively observed, the poems of Linda Gregg seek to trace the grief of living to its full and beautiful flower. Here, desire and longing, shot through with lucid observation and luminary grace, are as monumental, as sacred, as joy and fulfillment. Says W.S. Merwin of her poems, “They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance.”

Gregg’s work rings with the musicality of lived experience, of having traveled to where her poems lead and offering back an electric and intimate account of those journeys. With energy and insight drawn from, rather than brought to, the exploration of the inscrutable and inconsolable, Gregg works through grief and solitude with radiant dignity and quiet public grace. William Arrowsmith praises her for “an always observant eye, a disciplined musical sense, the true craftsman’s knowledge of her material,” and Gerald Stern says, “Linda Gregg brings us back to poetry. She is original and mysterious, one of the best poets in America.”

Things and Flesh is Gregg’s sixth collection of poetry; a new collection is due out from Graywolf press in Spring 2006. As Luci Brock-Broido put it, “Linda Gregg continues to the builder of beautiful contraptions, poems built steadfastly by real life, bright and stark, truths told tranquil in unblinding light.” Gregg is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and several Pushcart Prizes. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic Monthly, and she has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of California at Berkeley. 

Select Poems

Eight deer on the slope

in the summer morning mist.

The night sky blue.

Me like a mare let out to pasture.

The Tao does not console me.

I was given the way

in the milk of childhood.

Breathing it waking and sleeping.

But now there is no amazing smell

of sperm on my thighs,

no spreading it on my stomach

to show pleasure.

I will never give up longing.

I will let my hair stay long.

The rain proclaims these trees,

the trees tell of the sun.

Let birds, let birds.

Let leaf be passion.

Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be

between us. Let joy.

Let entering. Let rage and calm join.

Let quail come.

Let winter impress you. Let spring.

Allow the lost ocean to wake in you.

Let the mare in the field

in the summer morning mist

make you whinny. Make you come

to the fence and whinny. Let birds.

From CHOSEN BY THE LION (Graywolf Press, 1994)

It is on the Earth that all things transpire,

and only on the Earth. On it, up out of it,

down into it. Wading and stepping, pulling

and lifting. The heft in the seasons.

Knowledge in the bare ankle under water

amid the rows of rice seedlings. The dialogue

of the silent back and forth, the people moving

together in flat fields of water with the patina

of the sky upon it, the green shoots rising up

from the mud, sticking up seamlessly above the water..

The water buffalo stepping through as they work,

carrying the weight of their bodies along the rows.

The wrists of the people wet under the water,

planting or pulling up. It is this Earth that all

meaning is. If love unfolds, it unfolds here.

Here where Heaven shows its face. Christ’s agony

flowers into grace, spikes through the hands

holding the body in place, arms reaching wide.

It breaks our heart on Earth. Ignorance mixed

with longing, intelligence mixed with hunger.

The genius of night and sleep, being awake

and at work. The sacred in the planting, the wading

in mud. Eating what is here. Fish, bread, tea, rice.

From THINGS AND FLESH (Graywolf Press, 1999)

There is a modesty in nature. In the small

of it and in the strongest. The leaf moves

just the amount the breeze indicates

and nothing more. In the power of lust, too,

there can be a quiet and clarity, a fusion

of exact moments. There is a silence of it

inside the thundering. And when the body swoons,

it is because the heart knows its truth.

There is directness and equipoise in the fervor,

just as the greatest turmoil has precision.

Like the discretion a tornado has when it tears

down building after building, house by house.

It is enough, Kafka said, that the arrow fit

exactly into the wound that it makes. I think

about my body in love as I look down on these

lavish apple trees and the workers moving

with skill from one to the next, singing.

From THINGS AND FLESH (Graywolf Press, 1999)

About Linda

Poetry Center Reading Dates: October 2005