'U' prof., Renaissance scholar Gregerson utilizes poetic voice

When University Prof. Linda Gregerson unleahses her poetic voice, the wisdom and clarity of her language is unexpected and illuminating. Embedded in her poetry are thoughtful answers to all sorts of questions. How can such weighty subjects as death, disease and fear be handled with grace? How can one find hope and redemption in human tragedy?

Gregerson acknowledged that she is consistently drawn to the same subjects of mortality and the uncertainty of life in her poetry. "I became especially drawn to these themes when I was no longer the youngest generation, when I experienced the precariousness of our purchase here," she said.

This may be part of the reason Gregerson didn't develop her poetic voice until later in life. "I didn't write in college. I fled from it, in retrospect," she said. "I felt that there were skills in reading and writing poetry that I didn't understand."

While in graduate school at Oberlin College, Gregerson came under the influence of her teacher and mentor, Stuart Friebert, who encouraged her to begin applying her unique perspectives to poetic verse, tapping a talent that had previously laid dormant. "It scares me to think something so crucial in my life depended on one person," Gregerson said. "Without his extraordinary mentorship, (poetry) would have been a road not taken."

Gregerson began writing consistently while involved in Herbert Blau's experimental theater company, Krakan, where she was inspired by the exceptional talent of her colleagues and by their accomplishments when working together. "There's nothing like collaborative creative work," she noted. In 1975, after six years in the theater company, Gregerson left to pursue an MFA in creative writing at the University of Iowa.

This training opened the floodgates for Gregerson's creative energy to be expressed poetically. Her voice is often funneled into unique three-line stanzas that don't perfectly line up on the left margin, lending the poems a sense of both structure and imbalance. "What it gives me is some breathing room for the poem. Otherwise, it becomes over-impacted, misleadingly suggesting that it should be read faster than it should," she said.

However, Gregerson admits that the tercet has become more than just an indulgence. "By now, it feels like a life raft to me," she laughed.

In addition to being a poet, Gregerson is also a scholar and critic of Renaissance literature, having published "The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic" a few years ago. Along with this book of poems, she has another collection, "Fire in the Conservatory," to her credit.

Among other awards, Gregerson has received the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Isabel MacCaffrey Award from the Spenser Society of America and several grants and fellowships.

Although she received her Ph.D in Renaissance literature, Gregerson isn't necessarily directly influenced by poetry from this era. "My head is stuffed full of 16th-century works of all sorts," she said, "but it's not our shared language anymore," she said.

If anything, the influence of Renaissance works is more subtly felt in Gregerson's poetry, reflected in structural and temperamental aspects, which she said "are now like breathing to me.

"(Renaissance poets) were grand at allowing for intrusion, for juncture and disruption ... and for allowing things at odd with one another to be joined together," Gregerson said. This merging of unlikely and often opposing forces run rampant in Gregerson's poetry. The dichotomies of life and death, sickness and health, body and spirit are all explored. In "The Bad Physician," Gregerson delves into both the amazing possibility and the treachery of the body.

Gregerson has taught at the University for 10 years. Originally from a small town in Northern Illinois, she lived on both the West and East coasts before returning to the Midwest. She spoke glowingly of the University and of the Ann Arbor literary community, where you don't have to look far to find talented and personable writers with which to share ideas and a cup of coffee.

And what a pleasure to share ideas with Gregerson, such an acute observer of the human experience. Her wisdom explores the most delicate reaches of tragedy; she is a poet who, to borrow lines from her poem "Creation Myth," "will have to teach us something we / should long ago have known / by heart."

University Prof. Linda Gregerson.

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