Linda Gregg

• Born: September 9, 1942
• Birthplace: Suffern, New York
• Died: March 20, 2019
• Place of death: New York, New York

Biography

Linda Alouise Gregg was born in Suffern, New York, on September 9, 1942, and grew up in Marin County, California. She earned a BA (1962) and an MA (1972) from San Francisco State University. She married Jack Gilbert, a Pulitzer Prize nominee in poetry, in 1962, and she accompanied him to Greece in 1964. Their troubled marriage and subsequent divorce became the subject of several of her poems.

Gilbert taught at several small colleges and large universities, including the University of Iowa, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Her 1981 debut book, Too Bright to See, started a period of productivity as she developed her voice focusing on marriage, divorce, and romance.

After being diagnosed with cancer, Gregg died on March 20, 2019.

Achievements

Gregg was recognized with numerous awards and honors throughout her career, including numerous Pushcart Prizes (1981, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1991–92), a Whiting Writers’ Award (1985), the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize (1999), the Sara Teasdale Award (2003), the PEN/Voelcker Award (2006), the Sister Mariella Gable Prize (2008), and the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets and Writers (2009). For All of It Singing, she won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, all in 2009. In addition, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1993), and a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2003).

Gregg is known primarily for her poetry, although also wrote some essays on poetry. In “The Art of Finding” (American Poet, 2006), Gregg said that many poets focus their “concentration on the poem’s garments instead of its life blood.” She suggests that poets should focus on a poem’s subject rather than its form. She preferred looking for “luminosity” in poetry, a concept she explains as a poet looking inside the self for inspiration. Gregg related that many of her inspirations originated from her childhood and her experiences in the natural world, with her memories igniting many of her verses.

Analysis

Gregg’s career as a poet began slowly. After marrying Gilbert in 1962, she accompanied him to Greece, where her travels provided inspiration for her later works. Those travels continued after Gregg divorced Gilbert, and she developed a writing style that was emotional in tone and still maintained a distance from her subject. Her early works focused on the months in Greece as she watched her marriage unwind.

Too Bright to See

In 1981, Gregg published Too Bright to See, a poetry collection composed a decade after her divorce. Recognizing that Gilbert and their brief marriage was her inspiration, Gregg dedicated Too Bright to See to her former husband, noting that “it was like being alive twice.”

In Too Bright to See, Gregg adopted a persona, Alma, to describe the disintegration of her marriage. Gregg used Alma to maintain a distance from her work while offering the pure emotions experienced by any wife who knows her husband is with another woman. For example, in “Alma Watching Her Husband,” Gregg portrays her hurt and anger while offering the reader an insight into her struggles composing the poem: “Halfway through the scene I could not decide/ whether Alma should react or go on standing there/ by the window of her dark room.” One can almost see the poet wandering around her room in Greece, waiting for her husband to return, then struggling to set the scene, to put her emotions into words: “Maybe Alma should lie on the floor with her face showing/ Or smash tulips, kneel crying alongside,/ then quickly sweep them up. But I wanted something/ more tenuous.”

Gregg’s distance from the scene is obvious and deliberate in this poem; she describes her actions as if she were creating a fictional work. The description of a distressed, betrayed woman rings true, with the angry and disillusioned Alma seeking some release for her anger. However, the emotional distance from the subject, from Alma’s true feelings, may leave the reader feeling that the poem lacks something. Gregg’s poetry has come under criticism for presenting empty emotion rather than using her experiences as a catalyst. Later in the poem, she again examines her actions from a distance:

    I wrote it all down    the kind of daylight at    midnight in Denmark    and the kind at four in the morning.

Gregg creates a picture of confusion, daylight at night, her mind aflame as she searches for answers even as her husband falls for another woman. With her marriage collapsing, Alma is lost, unable to pick up the pieces of her life and move on. Gregg’s distance throughout her Alma scenes eases into acceptance of the inevitable. In real life, Gregg has maintained a working relationship with Gilbert, and the former couple have made joint appearances to celebrate their poetry.

In “No More Marriages,” Gregg’s anger at her failed marriage spills onto the page. There is more than a hint of cynicism spurred by an overly romantic view of marriage. The conversational style contrasts to the third-person narrative she used to describe the breakup of her marriage. It is as if Gregg is speaking to herself, vowing not to repeat her mistake while rationalizing her decision, defending it against an unknown questioner: “Well there ain’t going to be no more marriages./ And no goddam honeymoons. Not if I can help it/ Not that I don’t like men/ being in bed with them and all. It’s the rest.”

With a few simple words—“It’s the rest”—she sums up all the difficulties of a relationship. She leaves the reader to fill in all the problems she has left unspoken, an effective technique that says much while saying little.

Gregg uses her poems as therapeutic devices, analyzing her emotions and her broken marriage. Readers can glimpse real emotion behind the plotted emotion, although they will never be able to penetrate completely the veil separating Gregg from her words.

Gregg’s grislier side is evident in a dream sequence in “There She Is”: “When I go into the garden, there she is/ The specter holds up her arms to show/ that her hands are eaten off/ She is silent because of the agony./ There is blood on her face.” Gregg uses the specter as a symbol of her pain and confusion.

  I think I am supposed to look, I am not supposed  to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail  and all expressions gone. My God I think  if paradise is to be here  it will have to include her.

The final lines of the poem represent acceptance. Gregg’s Greek paradise is marred by her husband’s affair. Gregg cannot look away from the betrayal, from the mistress, although she realizes that acceptance of the situation is necessary if she is to remain. The symbolism is dramatic, stark and heart wrenching. Unlike her other poems on her marriage, this one speaks more of what Gregg feels rather than presenting a clinical analysis of a character.

In “Eurydice,” Gregg writes about the mythological Eurydice, who is rescued from Hades by Orpheus but is later betrayed by him and dies. Gregg speaks in Eurydice’s voice as she prepares to leave Hades with her husband: “I linger, knowing you are eager (having seen/ the strange world where I live)/ to return to your friends wearing the bells and singing the songs/ which are my mourning.” Gregg would return to this topic in many other poems and would portray the myth from Orpheus’s perspective In the Middle Distance.

The Sacraments of Desire

The Sacraments of Desire (1991) was published a decade after Too Bright to See. In “The Life of Literature,” Gregg adopts a more narrative style, describing everyday life in long, detailed proselike verse: “Very early in the morning at the edge of the capital/ she is trying to get a ride. The huge machines/ go past noisily covering her with dust.”

Chosen by the Lion

Chosen by the Lion (1994) includes poems that uses animals as symbols. In “The Lamb,” Gregg portrays London after the Blitz.

   The ruined city still seemed noble   The cathedral with its roof blown off   was not less godly. . . .   . . . Birds flew in and out   of the holes God’s fist made in the wall.

London, just like the lamb that walks through a door later in the poem, has been subject to attack but has maintained its stature and dignity. Gregg provides a mixture of the ordinary “roof blown off” with the sublime “holes God’s fist made” that heightens the feeling of the reader imagining the devastation suffered by the British.

Things and Flesh

In Things and Flesh (1999), Gregg writes poetry that pays attention to the things and flesh of the world. A frequent theme of the poems is loss and grief. In “Alone with the Goddess,” she writes: This is the sea where the goddess lives,/ angry, her lover taken away.” In “The Calves Not Chosen,” she describes blackbirds observing which calves are chosen and which sold for meat: “They love nothing/ and are murderous with each other./ All things of the world are bowing/ or being taken away. . . .” The poem describes the coldness of nature with an intensity flowing beneath the surface. She observes that the blackbirds are “all sinew and stick bones.”

In the Middle Distance

In the Middle Distance includes fifty-eight poems covering a variety of subjects. In “I Do Not Need the Gods to Return,” Gregg returns to the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, trying to add her voice to a familiar subject:

   I don’t need Orpheus to sing. I walk down the esplanade at night   I pass one loud bar after the other.   On the left the sea, bigger and stronger   after dark. Orpheus put down the lyre   centuries ago. Who knows what the woman   believe now that they are not guarded.

John Deming’s review of the book expressed exhaustion with poets using Orpheus as a subject and noted that Gregg was unable to add anything original to the myth. Deming also was a critic of Gregg’s romanticism, finding her language sickly sweet with an excessive reliance on the word “heart.”

All of It Singing

All of It Singing (2008) collects nearly thirty years of Gregg’s work, from her earliest collection, Too Bright to See, through In the Middle Distance, and adds twenty-two new poems. The new poems are largely personal poems in the same vein as her earlier works. Poets such as W. S. Merwin and Gerald Stein praised Gregg’s poetry, and this volume won two awards for Gregg.

Bibliography

Dooley, David “The Life of Literature.” Hudson Review 45, no. 4 (1993): 534-539.

Earnshaw, Doris. Review of Things and Flesh. World Literature Today 74, no. 2 (Spring, 2000): 370-371.

Genzlinger, Neil. "Linda Gregg, Poet of Taut, Vivid Verse, Is Dead at 76." The New York Times, 27 Mar. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/obituaries/linda-gregg-dead.html. Accessed 6 Oct. 2020.

Irwin, Mark. “Three Notions of Truth in Poetry.” American Poetry Review 37, no. 4 (July/August, 2008): 47-50.

Kevorkian, Karen. Review of In the Middle Distance. Virginia Quarterly Review 82/83 (Summer, 2006): 272.

Mlinko, Angie. Reviews of All of It Singing, by Linda Gregg, and Sources, by Devin Johnston. Poetry 193, no. 2 (November, 2008): 162-170.

Moldaw, Carol. Review of In the Middle Distance. Antioch Review 65, no. 2 (Spring, 2007): 397-398.