The
Presence In Absence
Poetry is not made of words.
I can say it's January when
it's August. I can say, "The scent
of wisteria on the second floor
of my grandmother's house
with the door open onto the porch
in Petaluma," while I'm living
an hour's drive from the Mexican
border town of Ojinaga.
It is possible to be with someone
who is gone. Like the silence which
continues here in the desert while
the night train passes through Marfa
louder and louder, like the dogs whining
and barking after the train is gone.
Marriage and Midsummer’s Night
since I stood in our dark room looking
across the court at my husband in her apartment.
Watched them make love.
She was perhaps more beautiful
from where I stood than to him.
I can say it now: She was like a vase
lit the way milky glass is lighted.
He looked more beautiful there
than I remember him the times
he entered my bed with the light behind.
It has been ten years since I sat
at the open window, my legs over the edge
and the knife close like a discarded idea.
Looked up at the Danish night,
that pale, pale sky where the birds that fly
at dawn flew on those days all night long,
black with the light behind. They were caught
by their instincts, unable to end their flight.
It Is
the Rising I Love
As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry.
On the stone back of Ludovici’s throne, Venus
is rising from the water. Her face and arms
are raised, and the two women trained in the ways
of the world help her rise, covering her
nakedness with a cloth at the same time.
It is the rising I love, from no matter what element
to the one above. She from water to land,
me from earth to air as if I had a soul.
Helped by prayers and not by women, I say
(ascending in all my sexual glamour), see my body
bathed in light and air. See me rise like a flame,
like the sun, moon, stars, birds, wind. In light.
In dark. But I never achieve it. I get on my knees
this gray April to see if open crocuses have a smell.
I must live in the suffering and desire of what
rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding
of gears against our bodies and lives.
The
Color of Many Deer Running
The air fresh, as it has been for days.
Upper sky lavender. Deer on the far hill.
The farm woman said they would be gone
when I got there as I started down the lane.
Jumped the stream. Went under great eucalyptus
where the ground was stamped bare by two bulls
who watched from the other side of their field.
The young deer were playing as the old ate
or guarded. Then all were gone, leaping.
Except one looking down from the top.
The ending made me glad. I turned toward
the red sky and ran back to the farm,
the man, the woman, and the young calves.
Thinking that as I grow older I will lose
my color. Will turn tan and gray like the deer.
I Thought on His Desire for Three Days
I thought on his desire for three days
and then said yes. In return, it was summer.
We lay on the grass in the dark and he placed
his hand on my stomach while the others
sang quietly. It was prodigious to know
his eagerness. It made me smile calmly.
That was the merging of opposite powers.
He followed me everywhere, from room to room.
Every single thing was joyous: storms, meals,
the story about the face that was the world.
There was the sound of Chicago buses stopping
near my house according to winter, summer,
raining. Shadows moved over the floor
as the sun went across the sky. I was a secret
there because you were married. I am here
to tell you I did not mind. Existence
was more valuable than that. When I was
a very young woman. I wrote: A new spirit/
now alone before the mirror/There is a flower.
The leaves are a little sad/No light comes
out of the black part/with its five purple
dots of color/near the center/Oh, my dead thing/
I have a new spirit/I made it myself. In Chicago,
it was not for me. I was strong, I knew where
I was. I knew what I had achieved. When the wife
called and said I was a whore, I was quiet,
but inside I said, “perhaps.” It has been raining
all night. Summer rain. The liveliness of it keeps
me awake. I am so happy to have lived.
A Bracelet of Bright Hair About The Bone
Skeletons and dry bones along with love.
As if violet was only beautiful against
something black. We also talked of death,
I perhaps more than you. It made me happy
to think of the newly dead body being lowered
into the coffin of the other. You found
this idea impressive but terrible.
I longed for your agreement and approval.
Wanted you to understand the hugeness of love.
You whispered that our bones would be mixed
together, but probably it was your way
to get me to stop crying and go to sleep.
Which I did, contentedly. I wanted something
to be done, some enactment to prove this secret,
this illicit love. Something too large.
I wanted it made of actual things. Dirt
and corpses even. As real as the table you
said your love was, that I could sit down to
and eat from if I wanted something permanent.
I wanted absoluteness to be made of my heart.
Let
Birds
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 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.
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 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.
We
Manage Most When We Manage Small
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
Elegance
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.
Alone with
the Goddess
The
young men ride their horses fast
on the wet sand of Parangtritis.
Back and forth, with the water sliding
up to them and away.
This is the sea where the goddess lives,
angry, her lover taken away.
Don’t wear red, don’t wear green here,
the people say. Do not swim in the sea.
Give her an offering.
I give a coconut to protect
the man I love. The water pushes it back.
I wade out and throw it farther.
“The goddess does not accept your gift,”
an old woman says.
I say perhaps she likes me
and we are playing a game.
The old woman is silent,
the horses wear blinders of cloth,
the young men exalt in their bodies,
not seeing right or left, pretending
to be brave. Sliding on and off
their beautiful horses
on the wet beach at Parangtritis.
on the wet sand of Parangtritis.
Back and forth, with the water sliding
up to them and away.
This is the sea where the goddess lives,
angry, her lover taken away.
Don’t wear red, don’t wear green here,
the people say. Do not swim in the sea.
Give her an offering.
I give a coconut to protect
the man I love. The water pushes it back.
I wade out and throw it farther.
“The goddess does not accept your gift,”
an old woman says.
I say perhaps she likes me
and we are playing a game.
The old woman is silent,
the horses wear blinders of cloth,
the young men exalt in their bodies,
not seeing right or left, pretending
to be brave. Sliding on and off
their beautiful horses
on the wet beach at Parangtritis.
The
Weight
Two
horses were put together in the same paddock.
Night and day. In the night and in the day
wet from heat and the chill of the wind
on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging
and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.
The dignity of being. They slept that way,
knowing each other always.
Withers quivering for a moment,
fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,
width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight.
Fences were nothing compared to that.
People were nothing. They slept standing,
their throats curved against the other’s rump.
They breathed against each other,
whinnied and stomped.
There are things they did that I do not know.
The privacy of them had a river in it.
Had our universe in it. And the way
its border looks back at us with its light.
This was finally their freedom.
The freedom an oak tree knows.
That is built at night by stars.
Night and day. In the night and in the day
wet from heat and the chill of the wind
on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging
and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.
The dignity of being. They slept that way,
knowing each other always.
Withers quivering for a moment,
fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,
width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight.
Fences were nothing compared to that.
People were nothing. They slept standing,
their throats curved against the other’s rump.
They breathed against each other,
whinnied and stomped.
There are things they did that I do not know.
The privacy of them had a river in it.
Had our universe in it. And the way
its border looks back at us with its light.
This was finally their freedom.
The freedom an oak tree knows.
That is built at night by stars.
Night
Music
She sits on the mountain that is her home
and the landscapes slide away. One goes down
and then up to the monastery. One drops away
to a winnowing ring and a farmhouse where a girl
and her mother are hanging the laundry.
There’s a tiny port in the distance where
the shore reaches the water. She is numb
and clear because of the grieving in that world.
She thinks of the bandits and soldiers who
return to the places they have destroyed.
Who plant trees and build walls and play music
in the village square evening after evening,
believing the mothers of the boys they killed
and the women they raped will eventually come
out of the white houses in their black dresses
to sit with their children and the old.
Will listen to the music with unreadable eyes.
The Wife
He walks into the night, her Roma, his being alive.
Toward that outer love. I wait in the hotel
until four. I lurch from the bed
talking to myself, watch my face in the mirror.
I change my eyes, making them darker.
Take it easy, I say. It is a long time to wait in,
this order of reality. My presence stings.
I grow specific without consequence.
The
Light Continues
Every evening, an hour before
the sun goes down, I walk toward
its light, wanting to be altered.
Always in quiet, the air still.
Walking up the straight empty road
and then back. When the sun
is gone, the light continues
high up in the sky for a while.
When I return, the moon is there.
Like a changing of the guard.
I don’t expect the light
to save me, but I do believe
in the ritual. I believe
I am being born a second time
in this very plain way.
Aphrodite
and the Nature of Art
I want a
net made of iron to hold
what I am. I love artifice.
Hephaestus made the net that hoisted up
his wife, Aphrodite, and her lover.
Caught them in their gleaming hardness,
all ecstasy and soft, most secret flesh.
Good, she thought, at the root of her being
as she locked her ankles around the gardenia
that she is. While the two men yelled
at each other, the women filed out of the room
full of chaos as well as shape. Their husbands
stood amazed at what they were seeing,
the wonderful fish-like economy of her lower back,
seeing the links pressed into her body's delight
and leaving the imprint rose-colored on her
pale flesh. Hair swelling through some of the gaps
as the crippled maker raised them like a masterpiece
higher in the half-light of the vast room.
what I am. I love artifice.
Hephaestus made the net that hoisted up
his wife, Aphrodite, and her lover.
Caught them in their gleaming hardness,
all ecstasy and soft, most secret flesh.
Good, she thought, at the root of her being
as she locked her ankles around the gardenia
that she is. While the two men yelled
at each other, the women filed out of the room
full of chaos as well as shape. Their husbands
stood amazed at what they were seeing,
the wonderful fish-like economy of her lower back,
seeing the links pressed into her body's delight
and leaving the imprint rose-colored on her
pale flesh. Hair swelling through some of the gaps
as the crippled maker raised them like a masterpiece
higher in the half-light of the vast room.
As Is
Pay attention, talk to no one unless
you are buying food or borrowing a book.
Or asking for directions to the border,
or the canyon, or the river with a pool.
Always formal. Poor with poor.
It's not the same here. No Greek ruins.
No fragment with legs of walking horses
painted delicately on it. No part
of a lion on bits of a glazed vase.
Like a code to tell of how the world they knew
would be destroyed. Here there is no need.
The rabbit's groin is ripped open
on the road. When you find a bird's wing
there is a flattened small bird attached.
A ranch at evening, the sun leaving,
antelope standing and the other birds
flying. All of it meaning the same thing.
The Part
Left Over
on this mountain, not merely the evidence.
Plainness and heat.
Bleached grass all the way
to the fig tree and the sea silent
far below. Sound of a lizard
disappearing into darkness
between rocks. Memories and the dream.
Insect, thorns, no shade, shards.
The face of a man on a broken vase
listening to someone on a missing fragment.
No language for the part of me
left over. A clay piece of just the hand
of a woman, two fingers touching
the front of her draped garment.
The special beauty of what’s absent.
Winning
There is having by having
and having by remembering.
All of it a glory, but what is past
is the treasure. What remains.
What is worn is what has lived.
Death is too familiar, even though
it adds weight. Passion adds size
but allows too much harm.
There is a poetry that asks for
this life of silence in midday.
A branch of geranium in a glass
that might root. Poems of time
now and time then, each
containing the other carefully.
Slow Dance by the Ocean
The days are hot and moist now. The doves say
true, true, true and fly lovely all the time
not quieted by the weather as the cats are.
The dogs bark only when there is a stranger.
The world moves, my Lord, and I stay still,
yielding as it passes through. I go down
the path to a bay that holds the ocean quiet,
a grassy place with oleander and broom.
When evening comes, things are clear delicately
until all is dark except the water, which is silver.
The sea takes me at night while I sleep.
During the day, memory is the pull of its huge
center. I have my dress to wash and lamps to clean
in the coming and going of time. I dance as slowly
as possible in the fields of barley and weeds.
The
Letter
I’m not
feeling strong yet, but I am taking
good care of myself. The weather is perfect.
I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea.
I expect to swim soon. For now I am content.
I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am
doing my best. It reminds me of when I was
sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside
and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something
in me that others receive more naturally.
Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life.
Even my failures in poetry please me.
Time is very different here. It is very good
to be away from public ambition.
I sweep and wash, cook and shop.
Sometimes I go into town in the evening
and have pastry with custard. Sometimes I sit
at a table by the harbor and drink half a beer.
good care of myself. The weather is perfect.
I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea.
I expect to swim soon. For now I am content.
I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am
doing my best. It reminds me of when I was
sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside
and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something
in me that others receive more naturally.
Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life.
Even my failures in poetry please me.
Time is very different here. It is very good
to be away from public ambition.
I sweep and wash, cook and shop.
Sometimes I go into town in the evening
and have pastry with custard. Sometimes I sit
at a table by the harbor and drink half a beer.
Looking
For Each of Us
I open the box of my favorite postcards
and turn them over looking for de Chirico
because I remember seeing you standing
facing a wall no wider than a column where
to your left was a hall going straight back
into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down
to where you stood alone and where the room
opened out on your right to an auditorium
full of people who had just heard you read
and were now listening to the other poet.
I was looking for the de Chirico because of
the places, the empty places. The word
“boulevard” came to mind. Standing on the side
of the fountains in Paris where the water
blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night.
It was dark then too and I was alone.
Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t
somebody find me all those years? The form
of love was purity. An art. An architecture.
Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue
and the statue with its front turned away
from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone,
hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones
and the stone walls. I turn the cards looking
for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes
full of caring and something remote.
His eyes are loving and empty, but not with
nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because
he is working. The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap
statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene
and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men
with smudges for mouths, backed by water,
each held still by the impossibility of what
art can accomplish. A broken river god,
only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed.
The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.
Goethe’s
Death Mask
The face is quite smooth
everywhere except the eyes,
which are bulges
like ant hills someone tried to draw
eyes on. It is normal of course,
that the mouth is shut
like a perfect sentence.
But there is nothing of Italy
or the rooms. As though it were
all a lie. As if he had not fed there
at all. I suppose there was never a choice.
If the happiness lasts,
it is the smoothness. The part
we do not notice. The language he made
was from the bruises. What lasted
are the eyes. Something ugly
and eaten into. What a mess his eyes are.
The
Woman Who Looks For Her Lost Sister She Says
She walks all the time in the Heart Ward.
She makes no sound. She is always alone.
If she is looking in the toilet stall and you come in
she leaves. She calls you Dear.
I was thinking of giving her my flowers.
Just now she came over and said,
‘You don’t have to be writing all the time Dear.’
I said, ‘Do you have any flowers?’
She said, ‘No Dear.’
I said, ‘Do you want any flowers?’
She said, ‘No, no flowers, Dear.’
I said, ‘Don’t you want any flowers at all?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s too late for flowers Dear.’
At the
Shore
Naked women are being dragged
down the sandstone shelving
on their backs, very slowly.
With ropes tied to each foot separately
so the legs close and spread open
as they are moved.
When they cry out or shout down
at the men sitting in the lifeguard chairs
looking at them through the gun sights,
the sounds, no matter how angry or foul,
curve and billow like a wave: coming
to the men on a soft wind
caressingly, like sirens singing.
Naked women are being dragged
down the sandstone shelving
on their backs, very slowly.
With ropes tied to each foot separately
so the legs close and spread open
as they are moved.
When they cry out or shout down
at the men sitting in the lifeguard chairs
looking at them through the gun sights,
the sounds, no matter how angry or foul,
curve and billow like a wave: coming
to the men on a soft wind
caressingly, like sirens singing.
The
Ninth Dawn
It is not for nothing we notice a wider theme
in Virgil’s Georgics when he speaks about
the passion of Orpheus and Euridice. The gods
want the honey in the hive, are willing to have
the lovers destroyed. There is a grand design
pulsing around their perishing. A great sound
in which we can barely hear the lovers crying
each other’s name. It doesn’t matter that Procne’s
bloodstained hands left marks on her breasts.
Virgil writes of important troubles: a country
at war, droughts and plagues, suffering and wrongs.
But the gods are interested in the honey, their minds
filled with the smell of burning thyme used
to fumigate the hives. I am haunted by Euridice
who merely went too far into the woods and after
lived with the darkness around her forever.
I think of her loss and crying out as I listen
day and night to the man upstairs whose cries
of pain are like a wounded animal unable to do
anything by suffer. The gods instruct us to cut
the throats of eight beasts, throw in poppies,
kill the jet-black ewe in the beautiful Italian
light so the bees, who have been the real business
all along, will swarm out again under the pliant boughs.
The Poet
Goes About Her Business
Instant Praxitelean. Instant seventy-five year old photograph
of my grandmother when she was a young woman with shadows
I imagine were blue around her eyes. The beauty of it.
Such guarded sweetness. What a greed of bruised gardenias.
Oh Christ, whose name rips silk, I have seen raw cypresses
so dark the mind comes to them without color.
Dark on the Greek hillside. Dark, volcanic, dry and stone.
Where the oldest women of the world are standing dressed in black
up in the branches of fig trees in the gorge
knocking with as much quickness as their weakness will allow.
Weakness which my heart must not confuse with tenderness.
And on the other side of the island a woman
walks up the path with a burden of leaves on her head,
guiding the goats with sounds she makes up,
and then makes up again. The other darkness is easy:
the men in the dreams who come in together to me with knives.
There are so many traps, and many look courageous.
The body goes into such raptures of obedience.
But the huge stones on the desert resemble
nobody’s mother. I remember the snake.
After its skin had been cut away, and it was dropped
it started to move across the clearing.
Making its beautiful waving motion.
It was all meat and bone. Pretty soon it was covered with dust.
It seemed to know exactly where it wanted to go.
Toward any dark trees.
Whole
and Without Blessing
Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with.
Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes
out of this fever and see the meaning
of my life clearly. A thing like a hill.
I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,
or need to be blessed. I belong to no one. I do not move.
Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet.
and the indifferent sun warms me.
I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.
Plums
Failing Well
out of the tree, to lie
squashed and decomposing
on the earth? So what if
the only attention they receive
is from the ants and birds
who find something in them
to feed from still,
all spayed and color changed?
If they could breathe,
do you think they would say
more than so what?
This is good, to live
to the end as something
to get taken. What was
the ripeness for anyhow?
Why should chromosomes blink
and twitch inside the seed,
the pit at the middle, the vast
earth-shaped center of all
of this? So what if we lie
here or there as pith
in the cold night where the owl
hoots at the stirring that will
compute into the dark color
of that calling and the ground
we leak into,
small piece by small piece.
Official
Love Story
There is a painting by Lucas Cranach
of a thing pink and white and motionless.
Nymph of the Spring. A young woman
stretched out naked against
her red robes which are bundled
behind her head and arm, casually,
to resemble an open rose.
A pair of plump quail in the foreground
echoing her breasts and belly.
A sacred pool with water spilling down
into it from a small cave darkened
like her mystery. She considers
with her young, elegant mind
the sound of the water on water.
Always smiling,
her eyes looking down.
Probably there is the sound of horns.
Everything in the best
German tradition.
The cream of her being.
The world slow with desire.
Passion announced by the shadows
everywhere in the picture.
Soon a perfect prince will come
with shining arms and black hair,
and oriental eyes. He will beg her
for the flower of her body.
She will consider it with her neat mind
which smells of lemon,
the way roses smell. Everybody will clap,
wanting the world to be made
out of passion and grace.
The voices of children will sing sweetly
of Christ in his loss and fear,
sing of the birth after,
sing of the Mystery to come.
The
Beckett Kit
I finally found a way of using the tree.
If the man is lying down with the sheep
while the dog stands, then the wooden tree
can also stand, in the back, next to the dog.
They show their widest parts
(the dog sideways, the tree frontal)
so that being next to each other
they function as a landscape.
I tried for nearly two months to use the tree.
I tried using it by putting the man,
standing, of course, very far from the sheep
but in more or less the same plane.
At one point I had the man almost off the table
and still couldn’t get the trees to work.
It was only just now I thought of a way.
I dropped the wooden sheep from a few inches
above the table so they wouldn’t bounce.
Some are on their backs but they serve
the same as the ones standing.
What I can’t get over is their coming right
inadvertently when I’d be content with any solution.
Ah, world, I love you with all my heart.
Outside the open window, down the street near the Hudson,
I can hear a policeman talking to another
through the car radio. It’s eleven stories down
so it must be pretty loud.
The sheep, the tree, the dog, and the man
are perfectly at peace. And my peace is at peace.
Time and earth lie down wonderfully together.
The blacks probably do rape the whites in jail
as Bill said in the coffee shop watching the game
between Oakland and Cincinnati. And no doubt
Karl was right that we should have volunteered
as victims under the bombing of Hanoi.
A guy said to Mishkin, “If you’ve seen all that,
how can you go on saying you’re happy?”
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Poems on
the Internet:
More information
about Linda Gregg on this blog:
Deep Weavers Faith. June 2019.
This
past Super Moon Vernal Equinox, America lost one of its greatest poets. Linda
Alouise Gregg was born on September 9, 1942, in Suffern, NY, with her twin
sister, Louise Belinda Gregg. They subsequently grew up on the west coast in
Marin County, riding horses in a camp their father ran, running with deer on
hills that rolled from Forest Knolls all the way down to Point Reyes. Such
paradisiacal landscapes figure prominently throughout Linda’s body of work.
When Linda’s debut, Too Bright To See, was published by Graywolf Press in 1981, it took contemporary American poetry by storm. Like a fully-formed Athena birthed out of Zeus’s head, it was one of the most talked about books of the year. Of course there were premonitions, prior rumblings. Michael Cuddihy had featured a dozen of Linda’s poems in a special issue of Ironwood with encomiums by Gerald Stern, Frederick Turner, and Tess Gallagher, accompanied by Betty Sheedy’s author photo of Linda crouched in a rural doorway, her hair lit up like a Lilith. Or a lioness.
Linda’s passionate mix of angst and grace in her poems was equally informed by classical idylls and mythical betrayals. As a teenager, Linda found refuge on a boat with an artist named Varda after being kicked off her father’s land. She eventually found her way to San Francisco State University, the Haight-Ashbury in high hippie 1960s swing, Janis Joplin packing venues. The woods, the weed, the West. North Beach and City Lights Books. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” All of this helped shape what she was to become.
Perhaps most fateful was the day Linda found herself sitting in the back of Jack Gilbert’s class for the first time, literally fainting upon meeting the poet. Their romance (some would call it an unofficial marriage) lasted eight years and turned into a lifelong friendship between poetic equals. Linda was a poet in her own right even before meeting Jack. At 16 years of age, she wrote “The Grub” and showed it to her sister Louise, asking her excitedly “Is this a poem?!,” a poem later published in her debut without revision. At SFSU, Linda wrote her master’s thesis on Pound, Beckett, and Catullus. So much for the lightweight stuff.
Linda and Jack lived and travelled all over Greece back in the day when it cost practically nothing to do so, and after years, they ended up in Copenhagen where Linda studied dance while Jack continued to write (and philander). The moment came when Linda threw off her ring and came back to the States. Much of her first book documents this period of her life.
Original printings of her second book Alma are scarce. Jonathan Galassi accepted the book at Random House before he was stolen away by FSG, and sadly, the book was recalled and shredded after only being in print for six months due to poor sales (those who remained behind at Random House didn’t even know the title was a book of poetry!). Linda decided to stick with Graywolf Press for the rest of her publishing career.
I met Linda in the summer of 1990 at the Aspen Writers Conference. I chose to work with Charles Simic so I could be free to befriend/stalk her! Earlier that year, Gordon Lish had asked me, “Who is the greatest poet in America?” and I said, “Linda Gregg!” “And who is the greatest teacher of poetry in America?” And I said, “Charles Simic!” Gordon said, “You must find them both!” What were the odds that both would be teaching in Aspen, along with Carolyn Forché completing that trifecta?
By then, Linda had completed her third manuscript, The Sacraments of Desire. By then, she had started an affair with the Great Love of Her Life. She paid the price, sacrificing her marriage, uprooting her life from Western Massachusetts and taking up residence in Chicago, much of this documented in her fourth book, Chosen by the Lion, a lyrical tour de force. During this time, we spoke almost daily on the phone for hours on end in the days before unlimited calling plans or the internet. My monthly MCI bills ran upwards of $400. Linda barely survived writing that book as her romance failed.
Linda once told me how she gave a reading with Louise Glück where Stanley Kunitz had introduced them. He apparently remarked how powerful and dark both poets were, then said Louise’s poems were “haunted like cemeteries” whereas Linda’s poems were “haunted like cemeteries . . . that were flowering.” Impossible to fact check but it rings true.
Both Linda and Jack never sought or accepted permanent full-time employment anywhere. It was too bourgeois. They preferred to live off next to nothing and retain their freedom as artists in a culture where Time = Money and the less money you need, the more time you have to read and write and live. She returned to her beloved Greece many times, also to war-torn Nicaragua, Indonesia too. In the time I knew Linda, the part-time teaching gigs and literary awards were essential for her survival. It’s true she finally bought her own place in Marfa, TX to fix up, but it was for a whopping $800. Some of those arid stripped-down desert landscapes inform both Things and Flesh as well as In the Middle Distance. You can’t help but feel the abandonment and austerity in those books mixed with hard-won clarity, even blessing.
As a teacher, Linda remains a legend. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1980s, Christopher Davis remembers that Linda’s opening workshop salvo was: “Sometimes I lay my body down on a marble slab . . . and become poetry.” Student jaws dropped. It was WTF in the days before texting or emojis. Linda has nurtured subsequent generations of poets, including a Columbia cohort who have made their names (Tracy K. Smith, Tina Chang, David Semanki and Boni Joi, to name just a few). To sit in a workshop with LG was not only to get meticulous and demanding line edits but equally challenging life lessons. When once asked to write a letter of recommendation, Linda responded, “When do you need that by, summer? Who knows where I’ll be by then, perhaps floating down the Nile.” She accepted Rilke’s injunction to “change your life” and expected nothing less of her acolytes.
A committed smoker and drinker, Linda’s health declined in the last decade of her life, most of it spent in New York City in a rent-controlled apartment she held onto for almost four decades. She hosted many informal gatherings in her kitchen, most often one-on-one, even while her public appearances grew fewer and fewer, her poems trickling to a halt, especially after the death of her beloved Jack whom she had devotedly cared for in his decline and for whom she tirelessly served as his literary executor after his death, no small task. Cancer returned this past year. In great pain, she was brought to Beth Israel Hospital where she finally succumbed just eight blocks from her home on St. Marks in the East Village. The neighborhood will never be the same.
‘Is This a Poem?!’ Remembering Linda Gregg. Timothy Liu on a Brilliant Poet, and Wonderful Teacher. By Timothy Liu. LitHub, March 25, 2019.
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