Linda Gregerson is the author of three books
of poetry, Fire in the Conservatory,
The Woman who Died in Her Sleep, which
was a finalist for the Poet's Prize,
and the Lenore Marshall Award, and Water-borne, for which she
received the 2002 American Academy of Arts and Letters
Award.
She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship,
two fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, a Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry
Society of America, and the Levinson
Prize from Poetry Magazine.
Gregerson is also a respected literary scholar and the author
of the prose works, The Reformation of the Subject:
Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic and Negative
Capability, Contemporary American Poetry.
If you are under the illusion that scholarship
is a dry endeavor, you should turn to Gregerson
who finds the pleasure in it.
Among her many papers are, "The Secrets of Princes,
Sexual Scandal in the Tudor Court",
and "Protestant Erotics, Idolatry and Interpretation
in Spenser's Faerie Queene".
For two years, she was an actress
in Herbert Blau's experimental theater company, Kraken.
And for six years, she was a staff editor
in poetry at the Atlantic Monthly.
Gregerson is now a professor of creative writing
and Renaissance literature at the University of Michigan.
I discovered Linda Gregerson's poetry
after the publication of the Woman Who Died in her Sleep.
I read the book in one sitting, and just a few poems in, I
began to weep for two reasons, because her poems rend my heart
and they do so so gently, and because I
didn't know poetry could be both frankly
intellectual and uncompromisingly accessible.
I was later given the good fortune
to work with Linda as my advisor at Warren Wilson College.
She was my able guide and companion
as I explored in excruciating minutiae the depth of silence
in poetry.
And I thought this was apt.
Thought that behind Linda's work was a pervasive silent mass.
What Beckett sought as he strived
to punch holes through language to get
to the nothing behind it.
But as I've continued to read Linda's poems over and over
again, I think I was wrong.
It's not silence I hear but breath.
She makes of it a framework for poetry.
The tightly controlled poems subtly and insistently
prime the reader's breathing to their own rhythms.
There is tensile strength to those variously long and short
lines.
Behind every line is an in and an exhalation.
Behind every word and in and an expiration.
Each breath is bursting with knowledge of its own mortality
and still exsurgent, there is sweet life.
Please help me welcome Linda Gregerson.
[APPLAUSE]