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Linda Gregerson is the
author of three books

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of poetry, Fire in
the Conservatory,

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The Woman who Died
in Her Sleep, which

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was a finalist for
the Poet's Prize,

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and the Lenore Marshall Award,
and Water-borne, for which she

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received the 2002 American
Academy of Arts and Letters

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Award.

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She has been the recipient
of a Guggenheim Fellowship,

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two fellowships from
the National Endowment

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for the Arts, a Consuelo
Ford Award from the Poetry

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Society of America,
and the Levinson

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Prize from Poetry Magazine.

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Gregerson is also a respected
literary scholar and the author

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of the prose works, The
Reformation of the Subject:

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Spenser, Milton, and the English
Protestant Epic and Negative

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Capability, Contemporary
American Poetry.

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If you are under the
illusion that scholarship

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is a dry endeavor, you
should turn to Gregerson

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who finds the pleasure in it.

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Among her many papers are,
"The Secrets of Princes,

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Sexual Scandal in
the Tudor Court",

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and "Protestant Erotics,
Idolatry and Interpretation

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in Spenser's Faerie Queene".

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For two years,
she was an actress

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in Herbert Blau's experimental
theater company, Kraken.

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And for six years,
she was a staff editor

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in poetry at the
Atlantic Monthly.

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Gregerson is now a professor
of creative writing

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and Renaissance literature at
the University of Michigan.

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I discovered Linda
Gregerson's poetry

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after the publication of the
Woman Who Died in her Sleep.

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I read the book in one sitting,
and just a few poems in, I

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began to weep for two reasons,
because her poems rend my heart

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and they do so so
gently, and because I

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didn't know poetry
could be both frankly

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intellectual and
uncompromisingly accessible.

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I was later given
the good fortune

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to work with Linda as my advisor
at Warren Wilson College.

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She was my able
guide and companion

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as I explored in excruciating
minutiae the depth of silence

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in poetry.

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And I thought this was apt.

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Thought that behind Linda's work
was a pervasive silent mass.

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What Beckett sought
as he strived

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to punch holes through
language to get

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to the nothing behind it.

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But as I've continued to read
Linda's poems over and over

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again, I think I was wrong.

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It's not silence
I hear but breath.

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She makes of it a
framework for poetry.

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The tightly controlled
poems subtly and insistently

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prime the reader's breathing
to their own rhythms.

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There is tensile strength to
those variously long and short

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lines.

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Behind every line is an
in and an exhalation.

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Behind every word and
in and an expiration.

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Each breath is bursting with
knowledge of its own mortality

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and still exsurgent,
there is sweet life.

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Please help me welcome
Linda Gregerson.

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[APPLAUSE]

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