Linda Gregerson is a poet who loves multiple voicing. She admitted to this slightly self-effacingly somewhere near the middle of her poetry reading in the Foster Auditorium last Thursday. It made every poetry student in the room want to run up and hug her, comforting her with, “It’s okay, we love you, we appreciate every ‘she,’ ‘you,’ ‘they,’ ‘us,’ and ‘I’ perspective you managed to cram into a single poem.”
This past week, students in every poetry class on campus were reading either Magnetic North or The Woman who died in her Sleep in preparation for Gregerson’s arrival. So when Gregerson finally did arrive, all white blonde hair and pixie stature, the crowd watching her was a self-contained interpretive community (shout out to Stanley Fish!) coming to her reading from equal preparation.
Normally, I go to readings by authors in the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series because I figure I better take advantage of the opportunity to hear an author read their work live. But this time, I had the added benefit of foreknowledge of Gregerson’s poetry. From my poetry seminar with Robin Becker, I had the poems from The Woman who died in her Sleep on repeat in my brain for over a week before the reading.
At the reading, Professor Becker introduced Gregerson. Of course I had heard Robin Becker do her fair share of poetry reading in class, but there’s something about putting her behind a podium and a microphone that heightens the drama of her voice, which already gives the feeling that something is truly at stake. Even Becker’s prose had a stylized attention to rhythm, so much so that when Gregerson approached the podium and kissed a greeting to Becker, her first words were, “I think I should just have you read my poems.”
But Gregerson’s no slouch with her voice either. She opened her reading strong with the one-two punch of “Sweet,” from Magnetic North and “For the Taking,” from The Woman who died in her Sleep. She’s not afraid to look at you when she reads or give her characters voices besides her own in the poem. Her readings were always an engagement with the audience.
Throughout, Gregerson was tightly hilarious in her delivery. In “Sweet,” Gregerson reads the line, “Sweet, he said./ Your mother’s wrong but sweet,” there was a brief pause for laughter here. Gregerson appreciated the laughs in a later poem she read called “The Selvage.” Describing a story her daughters told her about canvassing for Obama, she wrote the lines, “they used the word/ we’ve all agreed to banish from even our/ innermost thoughts, which is when/ I knew he was going to win.” When a light skittering laughter made its way across the room, Gregerson said, “I love when people laugh there.”
At the end of her reading, Gregerson returned to “The Selvage” to talk about its evolution as a poem. This was great to hear from the poet’s own mouth the journey she took and the struggle she had with her own words. She explained how later in her writing life she turned to writing dramatic monologues.
“I like this dramatic monologue business,” she said, “because it’s an exercise in restraint for me.”
But outside of the dramatic monologues (which she has written for Dido, St. Peter, and Ananias to name a few), she said she could never quite manage to write a short poem. Her poems usually occur in several movements. After writing the first movement of “The Selvage,” which detailed the story about canvassing for Obama, Gregerson initially congratulated herself on finally writing a short poem! But the next morning when she came to the poem again, she shook her head and realized, “Nope, I just can’t end it here. The ironies are predictable and the images clich�d.” It takes a strong poet to realize when your own work isn’t right. Gregerson wasn’t afraid to struggle with her stunted attempt at a poem instead of abandoning it altogether.
Gregerson said she’s learned a lot by forcing herself to write, either through commissioned pieces (which she announces as her “Favorite!”) or through not being afraid to keep writing until she feels the writing is done. By the end of her reading, which she joked about as being long and arduous, Professor Bill Cobb opened the floor for the post reading discussion. His contribution to the talk, as hilarious as was his interaction with Rebecca Rasmussen, was to make a surprise announcement to his Intro to Creative Writing Class.
By way of posing a question to Gregerson, Professor Cobb said, “They don’t know it yet, but my intro class is about to get their first poetry assignment,” here he paused so that the members of his class at the reading could absorb his mischief, “So…do you have any suggestions for them?”
Gregerson, it turns out, is a big fan of prompts. She exalted, “I believe in prompts that are very arbitrary and obtrusive. That way you can spend your time being annoyed and angry at me. I think it’s a good place to start writing from, if you have something to write against.”
So what was her prompt? Quite simple, actually, for a lover of obtrusive prompts, but arbitrary enough. She wanted Professor Cobb’s poets in training to write a poem about anything, with any line types. The only rule was that the poem had to start with the word, “No.” The poets had to figure out where they could go from there.
I thought that was such a good idea that I want to pass along that assignment to all you LAUS blog readers out there. Think of your own poem that starts with the word, “No,” and post your result in the comments below.
And, if you’re not too exhausted already by reading this long post, I encourage you to take advantage of some more reading. In response to the final question from the audience for the night, Gregerson recommended some good books to check out:
We don’t Know We don’t Know by Nick Lantz (Poetry)
Citizen by Andrew Feld (Poetry)
Percival’s Planet by Michael Byers (Novel)
Happy Reading (again!)