Linda Gregerson

As a reviewer for the New Yorker noted, “Gregerson’s rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically”. After her first collection, Fire in the Conservatory (1982), frustrated by the way her left-justified block stanzas seemed to stifle the syntactical leaps in her poetry, Gregerson created a specialised, sinuous tercet form in which she worked for nearly 20 years:

                          in what sense can the window
                             still be said
                    to govern point of view? Nostalgia? Backward

longing not so much for death-by-proxy as
                             for that
                    which makes the dying incidental. Hence

our beggarly rapture at stark divides: the cliffs
                             on one side, North
                    Sea on the other, and the mutilated
 
body (there is nothing quite so good at this)
                             for scale.

(from ‘Half Light’)

Of the form’s advantages, Gregerson notes, “the tercets were the first formal vehicle I found that seemed to me to be properly flexible, and true. Especially important was that second, deeply indented line, the ‘pivot line’ as I conceived it, often only a single metrical foot long. It gave me a kind of skeletal resistance, something that syntax could work against, and thus it became a true generative proposition, not just a kind of packaging. The lineation produced the poem.” With Magnetic North (2007), Gregerson moved on from the tercet to other modes of formal experimentation.

                                       And what should you see (still

sleeping) as you look for the source of the sound?
                         Our father on the mower making

                                            modest assault
           on the ever-inadequate-hours-of-the-day, as

manifest in your neglected
                         lawn. Fed up, no doubt. Confirmed

                                            in his private opinions. But
           knightly in his fashion and—it's this

I want to make you see—
                         in heaven to be called upon.

(from ‘My Father Comes Back from the Grave’)

Magnetic North was a National Book Award finalist, and Waterborne (2002) won the Kingsley Tufts Award. Gregerson’s other awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. She has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gregerson holds degrees from Oberlin College, Northwestern University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. She has taught at the University of Michigan and the Warren Wilson low-residency MFA program.
Bibliography

Poetry

Magnetic North, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 2007
Waterborne, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 2002
The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1996
Fire in the Conservatory, Dragon Gate, Port Townsend, WA, 1982

Literary criticism

Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2001
The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995


Links

Kenyon Review: Linda Gregerson interviewed by David Baker
Memorious 13: Linda Gregerson interviewed by Adam Day
Audio recording of ‘Eyes Like Leeks’
audio recording of ‘The Horses Run Back to Their Stalls’
Poetry magazine: podcast featuring Linda Gregerson
Slate magazine: ‘At the Window’, with audio