I wrestle a little bit with some of what Jack Gilbert asserts in this introduction he made of Linda Gregg at a reading at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, but some of it resonates beautifully and it’s all very Gilbertesque, isn’t it? More importantly, it reminds me of my utter devotion to poetry. I sat in the audience of a couple hundred and transcribed this word for word. I don’t know shorthand but Gilbert must have been speaking just slowly enough for me to keep up. I was obsessed with listening and recording. This might have been 1999 or so… Indeed, some of my students don’t recognize the tyranny they impose on their own poems:
“I started out a tyrant. I had to know the first line and the last line of the poem. I was such a tyrant that I would not write a line until it was perfect then I would go to the next line. She taught me to listen to the poem. It was a total surprise to me. I felt that if you didn’t watch the poem carefully it would be like riding a horse if you didn’t hold reigns tightly. It would just eat all day long and you’d always get home a little time after they finished dinner. She taught me pretty much by example to listen to the horse but not give into it. If you would give into it, the horse would eat all day. You have to balance the two. You have to listen and you have to have control. She also helped me to learn to trust material that I did not understand yet. It was strange being around her. I still have not met another poet like it. She wasn’t what I would call “ordinary.” Her way of writing was unaccountable. I think particularly it was because she grew up in the country. She lived with her family in a kind of paradise. Her father owned a mountain and they had all these horses and she and her twin sister Louise would spend all their time looking for … She didn’t grow up like the city. There was a sense of magic—magic of a kind that was not showy and, at the same time, Linda herself was unaccountable. I finally decided what was so strange about Linda, in terms of writing, was that she had the wrong side of her—well let’s say—her mind. She used the side of her brain that was supposed to do mathematics with the creative side of her brain and it still produces a unique kind of surprise. So many things were wrong. She wrote love poems. And everybody knows you didn’t write love poems. That’s for beginners, people who don’t make it. She wrote magnificent poems about passion, about the heart. I think it was because she lived in this green world for so long. It ended up like those periods in history when they didn’t have language—like the Japanese didn’t have a written language until the year 600. Japanese poetry is the pre-literary ability and they feel that poetry is that pure Japanese. It’s part of what I admire about Linda Gregg. But I have enormous respect for her insistence on magnitude…They’re not sentimental. They’re not small in communicating something you won’t find elsewhere.”