Oh No, Another Great Poet Gone – Linda Gregg (1942- March 19th, 2019) – Her “Eyes Open, Uncovered to the Bone”

American poet Linda Gregg (1942-2019) Photo Credit: Palm Beach Poetry Festival

Each Thing Measured by the Same Sun

Nothing to tell. Nothing to desire.
A silence that is not unhappy.
Who will guess I am not
backing away? I am pleased
every morning because the stones
are cold, then warm in the sun.
Sometimes wet. One, two, three days
in a row. Easy to say yes and no.
Realizing this power delicately.
Remembering the cow dying on the ground,
smelling dirt, seeing a mountain
in the distance one foot away.
Making a world in the mind.
The spirit still connected to the body.
Eyes open, uncovered to the bone.

Linda Gregg from Sacraments of Desire, Graywolf Press, 1991

Thanks to my friend Barb Pelman I only learned of the death of the American poet Linda Gregg a few hours ago. She has been a poetic talisman for me for about ten years. I have written much on her over the years. (See previous blogs dated Dec. 4th, 2012 and Nov. 30th, 2012. Also April 17th, 2014 and January 16th, 2016). The poem above, one my favorite Gregg poems. Statements like gunfire’s staccato. And the defining statement of the last line: Eyes open, uncovered to the bone. Linda, that was your genius along with the hammer-head simplicity and impact of the way you wrote what you saw, eyes open, uncovered to the bone.

I discovered Linda through her connection to the celebrated American poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) her former husband for eight years early in her life and life-long friend. Their relationship was tempestuous, filled with Gilbert’s betrayals, but their lives were inextricably intertwined until Gilbert died. When I met Gregg at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival about five years ago she was still visibly shaken by Gilbert’s death about two or three years before.

Gregg’s spare but searing poems with her matter of fact diction coupled with graphic images, confront and astound me. And her detached tone which heightens the shock value of what she says ! Like these lines from her poem, Wife, below:

My husband sucks her tits.
He walks into the night, her Roma, his being alive.
Toward that outer love. I wait in the hotel
until four…..

My time during a workshop with Linda at the Festival was not an easy time. She seemed distracted and at times disoriented. I was disappointed at times but never by her poems. And that is what I will remember and cherish. Her poems might seem like simple constructs at time but their freshness and surprise enlivens every reading! Like this favorite of mine, its first four lines:

Summer in a Small Town

When the men leave me,
they leave me in a beautiful place.
It is always late summer.
When I think of them now,
I think of the place.
And being happy alone afterwards.
This time it’s Clinton, New York.
I swim in the public pool
at six when the other people
have gone home.
The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses
so completely it leaves my heart empty.

Linda Gregg from All of It Singing, Graywolf Press, 2008

Now here is most of an earlier blog post I wrote many years ago on Linda and Gilbert: their extraordinary literary back and forth in poetry!

“In 1981 Linda published her first poetry collection, Too Bright To See – a remarkable debut in its own right. But it was made even more memorable by the raw and forthright poems directly and indirectly referencing her eight year marriage/relationship with  Gilbert and his infidelities.The book has many surprises but one stands out the most. In spite of not pulling her punches in her poems about Gilbert she dedicated her book to him: For Jack Gilbert. It Was Like Being Alive Twice.

That phrase It was like being alive twice, which I believe is originally from Li Po, the Chinese Tang Dynasty poet, shows up twice in the book, most notably, in light of the dedication, in this excerpt from the poem The Defeated.

I had warm pumpernickel bread, cheese and chicken.
It wa sunny outside. I miss you. My head is tired.
John was nice this morning. Already what I remember
most of the happiness of seeing you. Having tea.
Falling asleep. Waking up with you there awake
in the kitchen. It was like being alive twice.
I’ll try to tell you better when I am stronger.

What does the moth think when the skin begins to split?
Is the air an astonishing pain? I keep seeing the arms
bent. The legs smashed up against the breasts,
with her sex showing. The weak hands clenched.
I see the sad, unused face. The she starts to stand up
in the opening out. I know ground and trees.
I know air. But then everything else stops
because I don’t know what happened after that.

Linda Gregg from The Defeated in Too Bright To See, Graywolf Press, 1981

Ouch! Ouch! How she captures the “isness” of the shock, the moment. And the poem ends, as if at a cliff’s edge. Everyone, including the reader, swaying at that edge.

And another. Her emotion again palpable. And again the stopped time at the end. The emotional vertigo. The stark shock of the first line. The unsettling strangeness of the last line. Its irony. To grow specific without being specific!

The Wife

My husband sucks her tits.
He walks into the night, her Roma, his being alive.
Toward that outer love. I wait in the hotel
until four. I lurch from the bed
talking to myself, watch my face in the mirror.
I change my eyes, making them darker.
Take it easy, I say. It is a long time to wait in,
this order of reality. My presence stings.
I grow specific without consequence.

Linda Gregg,  ibid

Coincidence? In 1982 Gilbert published Monolithos, just his second book after a twenty year gap. It was dedicated To Linda Gregg with admiration and love. It in no way tried to rebut Gregg. Quite the contrary. While he doesn’t explicitly own up to the infidelities Gregg charges him with (that comes later in other books) he also documents the end of their marriage but the tone is so different, more distant, measured. It begins an extraordinary published poetic correspondence between them that goes on for another twenty plus years. And in spite or because of it they remained devoted friends to the end of Gilbert’s life in late 2012.

Here is an excerpt from Gilbert’s poem All the Way from There to Here:

What I remember best of the four years of watching
in Greece and Denmark and London and Greece is Linda
making lunch. Her blondness and ivory coming up
out of the blue Aegean. Linda walking with me daily
across the island from Monolithos to Thira and back.
That’s what I remember most of death:
the gentleness of us in that bare Greek Eden,
the beauty as the marriage steadily failed.

Jack Gilbert from Monolithos, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982

And here is another poem, more explicit but still without Gregg’s startling explicit declarations.

Walking Home Across the Island

Walking home across the plain in the dark.
And Linda crying. Again we have come
to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon
does not rise. We have only each other,
but I am shouting inside the rain
and she is crying like a wounded animal,
knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard
to understand how we could be brought here by love.

Jack Gilbert, ibid

But no matter the difference between the two descriptions these poets give of their failing marriage the intimacy they share with their readers is astonishing in its directness. I have experienced two marriages that ended and I consider these poems a gift. Their insights from a dying marriage with little or no rancor or judgement – something more like bewilderment. Yes, I say. It is so difficult at a marriage’s end to understand how we could be brought there by love.

This next poem, its simple direct statements,its use of one and two word sentences, creates a tension made from the heart-breaking simplicity of the images and, for me, from the terrifying matter-of-factness of the last two lines: She going out quietly afterward to scream in into the wind/ from the ocean. Coming in. Lighting the lamps.

A Kind of World

Things that are themselves. Waves water, the rocks
stone. The smell of her arms. Stillness. Windstorms.
The long silence again. The well. The rabbit. Heat.
Nipples and long thighs. Her heavy bright mane.
Plunging water flashing as she washes her body in the sun.
‘Perfect in whiteness.’ Light going away every evening
like some great importance. Grapes outside the windows,
Linda talking less and less. Going down to the sea
while she sleeps. Standing in the cold water to my mouth
just before morning. Linda saying late in the day
we should eat now or it would be too late to wash the dishes.
She going out quietly afterward to scream in into the wind
from the ocean. Coming in. Lighting the lamps.

 

It seems only fitting to end this blog with Gilbert’s poem from The Great Fires dedicated to Gregg.

A Year Later
(for Linda Gregg)

From this distance they are unimportant
standing by the sea. She is weeping, wearing
a white dress, and the marriage is almost over,
after eight years. All around is the flat
uninhabited side of the island. The water
is blue in the morning air. They did not know
this would happen when they came, just the two
of them and the silence.  A purity that looked
like beauty and was too difficult for people.”

3 Comments

  1. Sandy Martin
    Posted March 21, 2019 at 12:44 pm | Permalink

    Thank you Richard for leading me to Linda Gregg; before this, unknown to me. I have loved Jack Gilbert’s poems forever.

    I am sorry for yet another poet-loss for you. And we know, at the same time, their words will be in the world always.

    I was struck with grief when May Oliver died. Her poem “Surprise” about a bear:

    “…her four black fists
    flicking the gravel,
    her tongue
    like a red fire
    touching the grass,
    the cold water.
    There is only one question:
    how to love this world.”

    Take good care Richard.
    Sandy

  2. Richard Osler
    Posted May 5, 2019 at 6:58 am | Permalink

    Thank you Sandy!

  3. Sandy Martin
    Posted March 21, 2019 at 12:46 pm | Permalink

    Of course, Mary Oliver, not May.

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