 Linda Gregerson, David Thorburn. Hello. Are these working now? OK. I'm David Thorburn. I'm the director of the communications forum. I'd like to take one quick moment to mention that this is the first of three forums we're sponsoring this semester. The other two are coming in fairly quick succession, and there is information at the back of the room concerning them, and I won't waste time talking about them here. When I spoke to, Linda is an old friend of MIT, and many of you here have known Linda from years ago when her husband taught here, and Linda was a somewhat unhappy and ambitious faculty wife. I think it was one of those. Blissfully happy. I don't mean she was unhappy with her marriage. She was unhappy at all. But I got to know her then, and from the very first time I read any of her poetry, I knew that I was in the presence of a distinctive voice. When we talked about what we would do today, it struck me, and Linda was kind enough to agree, that I had issues with traditional poetry readings. And one of the reasons is I think there's something distinctive about Linda's poetry that makes it uniquely problematic simply to hear. So one of the things we, and there will be a good deal of reading. This is sort of a reading with commentary, and I'm going to ask Linda to engage in a quick conversation with Linda that will lead into the reading of some poems. And then when we complete the conversation, we'll open the floor to discussion or questions or comments from you, and maybe Linda will read other poetry. When we complete this, what I hope will be a very memorable event, we will have a reception in this room for all of you who are here, and I hope you'll linger for that as well. So let's be, so Linda and I have talked about the kinds of things we would discuss. And I'm going to be, for some of you who are strong and wonderful poets in the audience, I know there are certainly many people here who would be more qualified than I to ask these kinds of questions. But I'm going to try to play a really sort of direct and honest, I'm going to ask naive questions, or at least questions that I think would puzzle not professional poets, but serious, but ordinary readers. And try to get Linda to talk about what I feel, at least, are at least some of the most distinctive features of her remarkable poetry. So the first topic that, if I can find my notes, the first topic I thought we would take up is something that is not often systematically talked about, especially at poetry readings. And it's a technical question. In her early books, and especially in The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep and Waterborne, Linda used a very distinctive three line stanza, which I have come to think of as the Gregerson Tercet. And my reason for thinking that, and this is also one of the reasons why in the back, if you don't have these little readers, please pick them up in the back of the room, because we want to test one of my theories, which is that listening to a poem by Linda, no matter how brilliantly she reads it, it can't be the same as actually seeing the words on the page. And it may well be that hearing her read and seeing the words on the page is the best of all possible worlds. But we're going to try to test this, because at some point I'm going to ask Linda to read a poem that you can't follow. And we'll see if there's a difference. So I thought we would begin then by talking about what I suggested is the Gregerson Tercet. And Linda, let's begin by, why don't you read the first poem. It's poem number one on your sheet, The Resurrection of the Body. And we'll talk a little bit, try to imagine, as she's reading, what it would be like not to be able to see the way the words are disported on the page. I remember once having a conversation with Linda in which she said, oh, I really like this poem because his poems breathe on the page. And at the time, I didn't fully understand her. But then as I paid more attention to these poems, I realized what she said. You can see how the words have, these are exact replicas of what the pages in her book look like. And you can see how the lines colonize the page in certain complicated ways and need the space on the page. Linda. OK. This poem is called The Resurrection of the Body. She must have been 13 or so. Her nascent breasts, just showing above the velcro strap that held her in her chair, her face translucent, beautiful, as if a cheekbone might directly render a tranquil heart. And yet the eyes were all disquietude. The mother with her miraculous smile, frequent, durable, lifted the handkerchief. You know the way a woman will. Her index finger guiding a corner, the body of it gathered in her dexterous palm. And with such tenderness, wiped the spittle, pooling at her daughter's mouth, the faint warm smell of lipstick. Remember, freighted with love. And with that distillate left by fear, when fears been long outdone by fearful fact, the mother would give her soul to see this child lift her head on her own. And down the hall in orthotics, I couldn't for the longest time understand why the boy required a helmet so complexly fitted and strong. His legs were unused. His arms so thin. Treadmill, I thought, or a bicycle, may be some bold new stage of therapy. Anyway, sometimes he falls, and safe in his helmet can bravely set to work again. It wasn't for nothing that I was so slow. Who cannot read these waiting rooms has so far, exactly so far, been spared. It was only while I was driving home a daughter in her car seat with her brand new brace that I thought of the boy's rhythmic rocking and new. Green light, yellow, the tide of pedestrians flush and smooth, and the boy's poor head against the wall. How could I miss it? And what does God in his heaven do then? The boy's poor head in its bright red helmet, knocking, listen to be let in. I may have slightly undermined the astonishing power of this poem by having her read it second instead of first. I forgot my order. But let's talk. I mean, I think the subject matter of the poem is so overwhelming that it may seem impertinent to talk about the technical features of the poem. But I'd like to ask you, Linda, about the way you distort these tercets on the page and what kind of energy it gives you, how it helps you get to your subject. Well, I did have a book I wrote before that was not written in this stanza form. And they were sort of varied stanzas, but they were basically they were all flush left. And the lines were roughly the same length. So they were kind of rectangles of one sort or another. And I had this terrible experience. There was an anthology. This is ages ago. Dan Halpern did a sort of all poetry edition of Anteus. And it was sort of everybody was in it. And it was wonderful to be in it. And I was very pleased and honored. And we were all in it alphabetically. And I was sort of reading through from start to finish to come upon my own poems. And when I sort of turned the page and came upon my poems, I was actually appalled because I realized that the stanza form I was working in was actually deeply misleading about the pacing of the poems. And it was that opposite of breathing on the page. They seemed really, really airless. And that there was no time between anything. And partly, it felt like it was a betrayal of the I think a lot about syntax. I mean, I think if there's one formal proposition that's common to all of us, now that many of us don't work in received forms like meter and rhyme, the syntax is it. And it's very important to me. And I felt like there was no, I made a wretched botch of it by doing the stanzas that way. Because it was misleading about how to hear the syntax, which I think of as a, which I had imagined I'd very carefully disposed so as to have a lot of speedings up and slowings down and sort of pivots. And so I, in despair, thought of throwing myself into the river. And then I thought, well, maybe I could mess with the stanza. And so I just, I messed around a lot. I tried a lot of things. I didn't do what might have been more intelligent, which is actually go look at other poets and see what they'd been doing. I just kind of disposed things on the page. And I finally, this one really helped me because of its asymmetries. It's three. It's also indented. They're not the same length. There's a kind of what I think of as a pivot line in the middle. And it gave me a sort of resistance grid through which the syntax could move. And so I write, I mean, I really write into this. I wrote two books into this stanza form. And for me it was absolutely essential to sort of, where do I go from here? I was being told where to go from here by the stanza. So when you begin to use the stanza form, it's as if you're sort of embarked on a journey. You don't know its outcome when you start. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the very reason that after two books I had to leave it because I started knowing the outcome too well. I mean, not in terms of subject for any given poem, but in terms of what it was going to sound like, what the cadences would be, what it kind of, where it would culminate, where it would. And so I had to sever myself from what had become a kind of life support. One of the things that this style depends upon, even more systematically than conventionally left justified poetry, is the grammar. And I wonder, in fact, you're a deeply grammatical poet. Depend on grammar even when you elide or eliminate certain verbal elements, certain grammatical elements in the sentence, you're still aware of what's missing. If you never write ungrammatically, I remember consciously ungrammatically, unless there's a dialogue element or something like that. And that strikes me as interesting too. And I wonder if you were aware of the fact of the sort of the rigor of your grammar and of the extent to which some of the poems profoundly depend. I mean, you can go on many, many lines before you'll get to the verb. And it's only because of the grammatical structure that it's held in place. Well, I love grammar. It's my, I diagram sentences, you know. I mean, I would make everybody do it at dinner parties if I had my way. And I, again, I think it's, I love the architecture of English syntax. And I think of it as a sort of social contract. It's a contract of expectation. It's a promise. If I say I'm, if I say I'm, you expect something to come after that. And I may transgress that contract. But the power of transgression that is being ungrammed, you know, sort of pulling the rug out or subverting, it only has its own sort of torque if it's, if one has in mind the traditional sort of forward momentum of syntax and the sort of, the expectation that has to do with, say, a delayed verb and, you know, internally- So at one point, the fact that there's a momentum embedded in the grammar enables variation because the grammar's momentum allows it. Absolutely. I mean, I keep trying, I talk to my students a lot. Syntax has gone missing in a certain amount of contemporary American poetry. And I'm happy to say not, not as badly as was the case maybe a few years ago. But I teach young writers a lot. And I, there's sort of the vague swimming in nominatives or, you know, which is a very tempting thing to do as a poet because you kind of, there feels like immediacy and you're not being so stiff and straight jacketed as to assert stuff which sentences make you feel as though you're doing, right? And it's, so it can feel hip, it can feel, but you know that, but you sacrifice a huge amount if all you do is, I mean, A, you can't be just adjectival. So most of these young writers are far too clever to make it that. But there is a lot of floating on nominatives and extended nominatives. And there can be passages of that that are actually really wonderful. But it needs to be over against something. They need to be able to, they need to have other things in their toolkit, frankly. And for me, a lot of formal variation, apart from what I've called momentum and this sort of disposition on the page and the disposition on the voice, there's also the question of just varying length. I have a wonderful colleague of mine, not an immediate colleague, but a friend and colleague who teaches at Minnesota, the wonderful prose writer Patricia Hamilton, Patricia Hample, when she is teaching workshop, she says, I often take a, if I'm doing, she does creative nonfiction. She says, I bring tracing paper in and I have my, the students take a piece of their prose, their last essay or their last short story. And they just, with the tracing paper, I just have them take a pencil and mark or a pen where all the end stops are, where the periods are. And then they take their prose away and they look at the page. And if they're about equal distance all the time, there's a problem. And it's a very, it's a really nice exercise. And I, so, I mean, I'm just always aware of the sentence. I love the sentence. I think the sentence is my friend. And it does, you know, there are times when one of the propositions I'll launch and it'll be emotional as much as anything else is, I'm gonna go, I mean, I'll make this one last as long as I can. I'm just gonna like go out, you know, on a sort of, I'm gonna go over the abyss here and see how long I can make this go without coming to a, and there's a kind of, there's a tension. There can be, sometimes it can be desperation, sometimes it can be playfulness and overconfidence, but and in a way it is a vehicle for whatever emotional freight the subject of the poem may prompt. I see, well, we probably should let the tercets live in their glory without further comment, but I can't resist at least one more question about it because I find that the experience of reading these poems organized in this way, that the two things happen while I'm doing that. One is that the strange or unexpected spacing creates moments of pause where you wouldn't expect them and that's then often reinforced by the fact that when you come to the end of the line, you're not always sure what grammatical formal follows so that there's a kind of mystery or uncertainty is introduced almost as if you can sometimes imagine alternative choices that you might have made and I take it that that's part of your attention. Yes, absolutely. And I also assume that part of what you're doing is trying to make the reader slow down. Yeah, absolutely. So that one of the experiences I've had in some of Linda's most powerful poems, like the one she just read, but many others as well, is the sense I have, I wonder if you intend this, Linda, that I'm actually following a mind as it's thinking, as it, in other words, as if what's being dramatized in some sense is the process of thought and association that's going on, which a more simply lineated poem would not reproduce. Am I, is that right? I'm thrilled to hear you say that. I mean, I hope that that's very much my hope. It is authentically the experience as well. I mean, I think that's what form of any sort does. I mean, there are people who would probably be appalled and disapproving to hear me even talk about this as form. It's not traditional form, but it is, it is a set of propositions that repeat with some rough parameters. And I think for me, I should have said that in the first place. The most important thing about it is that it actually does make the unfolding of the poem a discovery process for me. There is this sort of turning a corner and not knowing exactly what will be there. That also replicates in an even deeper way an aspect I think of the experience of reading you, Linda, which is that one of your habits, I'm sure that this irritates naive readers or impatient readers is that there's a kind of obliqueness or cunning in some of your poems. Maybe cunning's not the best word for what I mean, in which certain information is delayed. It's hinted at and then it's delayed and you don't get the answer until later in the poem. And I was wondering if you could say a couple of words about that and then maybe we could look at a poem a poem or two that actually enacts that process of delayed disclosure. I don't know of a better way to describe what I mean where you have the reader has some partial information but there's some mystery that isn't fully answered until we get deeper into the poem. And that seems like what you were saying before about the reader sort of replicating in some sense the experience the poet had in making her discoveries. Well, I think there are some, I mean I could read an example of one that's probably most explicit that way or and another where I, the poem led me into territory, I really didn't think I was going into, but that was where I had to. These are not ones that we have on the, good. So read one of these and do my tests, see if it's harder to understand without being able to see it on the page. Okay, I'll do the one where there's delayed disclosure. And this was really, it's multi-sectioned. This was one, it's actually part of my effort to be as direct as possible. That is, I'm really not being coy. I actually hate coyness. Well, obliquity is not coyness. Okay, but it's also, I think sometimes the most immediate thing in poetry is not necessary. I believe that narrative or story or implied narrative is an enormous part of lyric poetry as well. It's almost always narrative that's kept off the page. So there'll just be a touch that will, so it'll be suggested as existing in the white space in the surround or prior to the poem. But I actually think the thrust of implied narrative is a huge part of lyric that we often forget to acknowledge. But storytelling in poems is very rarely a matter of this happened and that happened and that happened. There's this sort of what's most urgent and then in what sequence do you unpack it to make sense of it? And that can be both an emotional trajectory. I think ideally it's both emotional and a kind of cognitive or analytic even that it's the two happening together. Okay, so this poem is called Safe and... And it's written in the tercets. And it's written in the tercets. It may have been the first one I actually wrote in this form and it's in four sections. One. You should give the title. Safe. One. The tendons sewn together and the small bones healed. That your hand might close on a pencil again or hold a cup. The delicate muscles made whole again to lift your eyelid and govern your smile and the nerves new laid in their tracks. The broken point of the kitchen knife and here let the surgeon be gentle removed and the skull knit closed and the blood lifted out of the carpet and washed from the stairs. And the 19 year old burglar returned to the cradle or his mother's arms. He must have been harmless once. Even he who is not sorry had nothing to lose and will never be harmless again. Two. Emma is learning to wield her own spoon. Silver for abundance. Though it seldom finds her mouth as yet. She hates to be fed would rather starve but loves to steer the precarious course herself. Silver for pride then. Or luck of the sorts some children are born with omitting the manifold slippage that separates privilege and wheel. Luck in his popular figure is three parts silver anyway that the child not succumbed to crack in the schoolyard, rats in the hall, the clever fence with a shopping list, bad plumbing, bad food and hatred on a staircase with a knife in hand and dim designs on jewelry or a VCR. The spoon was superfluity. The best parts of your paycheck for a child you haven't lived to see. Friend, her cheek is fresh as hope of paradise. And every passing minute in the hours of light and the hours of darkness, in the fever of pneumonia or the ignorant sweet wash of health, the miraculous breath moves into her lungs and stitch by mortal stitch moves out. Three, when the paramedics came at last, my friend apologized. She must have hit her head, she thought. She'd just take a minute to mop up the mess by the phone. Her broken hands for which the flaw in memory had provided no such alibi. Her broken hands had kept him two or three times from her face. And later, when the anesthesiologist had launched her on his good green gas and launched her as they do sometimes, a shade too fast, she slipped the bonds of recall altogether. Safe as houses. You know what a house is for the likes of us. Down payment on the nursing home. Our four square pledge to be debtors of conscience if debtors in conscience may not look too closely where credits refused. Our piece of the here for hereafter which shows us diminished regard and just such a face as fear has made. One night, a woman came home to her house and locked its useless locks and buttoned her nightdress and read for a while and slept till she was awakened. So that is the story of, it's an elegy for a friend of mine who was killed by an intruder. And I even lied a little bit in it. I made him a burglar. He wasn't, he'd actually stalked her and just come in to murder her. I also suppressed the fact that he was a young man of color because I needed to keep a different openness in the poem, I thought. I, it felt very, it felt like very difficult terrain to begin with. And I had no business claiming certain kinds of suffering myself or making judgments. I certainly didn't wanna mouth pieties about race in America or relative economic deprivation and hardship but I had to make, I guess I had to guard against the wrong kinds of pity and the wrong kinds of complaint. And I also had a story I wanted to tell and I think I needed to begin with what was most salient was the near miss of my friend almost being safe, almost being alive but not having been lost as so many are kind of inadvertently on an operating table afterwards. I also had a very young, my first young child at the time and the link was a gift that this friend had sent when my daughter was born. And also the kind of struggle that all of us were going through in trying to manage first homes and early jobs and paying mortgages and early stability. Something that you said about, I mean, most of your poems take on what turned out to be immensely difficult and often painful subjects in something of the same sort of tone of respect, unsentimental respect that it's one of the aspects of your poems that I most admire. One of the things you said I thought was especially interesting Linda and it was that you changed the facts here and because so many of your poems seem grounded in autobiographical truth, I mean, and we'll read some of those poems that talk about your ancestors and so in a bit. One of the things I'm wondering is did you change those facts? Was the things you told us about grandpa only, were they lies? I mean, that would be very disappointing to me. No, and all I did was insert the line about dim designs on jewelry and a VCR and I made them dim and I also made it part of a metaphorical vehicle as it were. I didn't say that I was describing exactly that boy so this is very reassuring. That's the broadest liberty I took. That's the broadest liberty I took. You see, one reason that I, those of you who know Linda's poems I think will understand why this makes me uneasy because one of the, as you'll see from poems that you'll be reading shortly, one of the most powerful claims you make or one of the aspect of the poems that especially the ones that contain sort of stories of your father or your grandfather or your no region ancestry in the upper Midwest. One of the things that makes them so powerful is that they seem to come out of a kind of personal witness and it seems to me that the reader hears in those poems a claim of truthfulness and that you would, that it's an example in a certain sense of what one might mean when one's, what it means to use the first person or to write out of personal experience and it would seem to me that you'd be violating some contract if you were inventing these old gestures. I agree. I think, I think the poems invite the reader to believe that they're truth-based. Poems like these certainly do. When I might be writing, you know, Dido poems that might be a little different, very different but that there are specific gestures to indicate not only somehow this really happened reader but this, I have, this mattered to me for some reason that there's some proximity. So in the resurrection of the body, I didn't just invent scenes in pediatric neurology clinics. That business about my daughter with a brand new brace in her car seat was meant to be the, how did I find myself there and why in a way am I so heart-sickened and why am I confessing my relative immense good luck? I mean, why, you know, so it's, so when I invite the reader to think I'm showing you my stakes in this, I actually think it's extremely, I mean, it's extremely important to me that it be true, that that be actual. That's not, that's not a universal understanding of lyric speakers. Maybe I could ask you, Linda, to read, actually this was the poem I wanted to begin with but it works in here too. Another poem that's very similar in some ways to what you've seen it, but it shows how when, I mean, this is a mode, I think, in which Linda works especially powerfully. I mean, her poems are, those of you who've read or know this are full of element for the frailty of the body, for the accident of, bad biological luck and many of her poems are astonishing sort of lyric laments over this. Well, here's a poem also written in the Treset style, it's number four on your sheet and it also will allow us to say a little bit more about grammar. And my favorite grammatical mood, which is the subjunctive, one of the great revelations I had about, and this is tribute to a local, a Cambridge local, to what it is that practical criticism could do for the world, was when I read the preface to Helen Vendler's beautiful first book on Wallace Stevens and where she explains what he does with the subjunctive, how he makes a world, how he builds castles in the air, how he'll start his propositions he'll start poems in the subjunctive mood and simply modulate without our quite, you know, knowing where into the indicative because that which he has proposed as if has assumed that much critical mass inside the poem. Anyway, I was not by any means trying to be either Helen Vendler or Wallace Stevens here, but I do love this subjunctive and I think it's a, you know, it's a place that as if or contrary to fact or hypothetical that is really important to human imagination generally and certainly to poets. And this should be a good test because there are profound similarities between the poem Linda just read, which was the one that was not on our sheets and this one. The implicit belief is that magnificently as she reads, I'd have only heard her read once before and I'm again, her reading is wonderful. Nonetheless, if I can't see Gregerson on the page, I don't feel I'm getting her. See if you agree with me. Um, grammatical mood. One, there is to her mind only one or only one that's built to scale had they known sooner, had the only man to whom the CAT scan yielded so much detailed information not been out of town that week, had those few sticky platelets moved with just a shade more expedition through the infant artery. The parallel life will not relent but look, we may say to her, look at them tied to their breathing machines. They do not cry because of the tubes you'll say you're right. To you, the silence is dreadful. To you, the vicious calculus abides no counter argument. The oxygen that supplements their unripe lungs destroys the retina, leaving the twice struck child in darkness. What must they think of us bringing them into a world like this? Two, for want of an ion, the synapse was lost. For want of a synapse, the circuit was lost. For want of a circuit, the kingdom, the child, the social smile. And this is just one of the infinite means by which the world may turn aside. When my young daughter, whose right hand and foot do not obey her, made us take off the training wheels and rode and fell and peddled and fell through a week and a half of summer twilight and finally on her own traversed the block of breathing maples and the shadowed street. I knew what it was like to fly. Sentiment softens the bone in its socket. Half the gorgeous light show we attribute to the setting sun is atmospheric trash. Joy is something else again. Ask Macon on her two bright wheels. Three, to live in the body as if there were another place. To graze among the azaleas which are poisoned to humans, beloved by dear. Not everything the eye enjoys will sit benignly on the tongue. It must have been a headshot left her ear at that frightening angle and the jaw all wrong. So swollen it's a wonder she can chew. Is that where they aim the good ones when they're sober? At the head. At a doe. The DNR biologist is saintly on the phone. Though God knows he's not chiefly paid to sav the conscience I have bad dreams of a gardening species stricken by its own encroachment. For Cundity starved the deer in the forest. It fouls the earth it feeds upon. For Cundity plants the suburban azalea which dies to keep the damaged deer in pain. I mean alive. For want of rain the corn was lost. For want of a bank loan cloud up the windbreak and burnt it. You must learn to think on a different scale they told us that. For want of a windbreak and rainfall and corn the topsoil rose on the wind and left. God's own strict grammar imperative mood. I meant to return to joy again. Just give me a minute. Just look at the sky. I think that would make a great title for a book of criticism of readings of Linda's work. Just give me a minute. Just look at the sky. There's a kind of plangency in it that I especially because of her earlier description of the fact that most of what we see in the sky is junk and ugly. It seems to me a line of genius. A couple of things about this poem Linda that I'd like to ask you about. One of them is the way in which you disrupt the somewhat regular expectations you have from your own tercets. Why do you do that? In the words for example, in section four begins with the final line of a tercet. Right. And this is something that of course that you do elsewhere. I mean, why do you do that? Why is it important to do that? I guess it doesn't get too boring. Partly of course, it's a kind of sheeting. I mean, I did that. Each of these sections breaks in the midst of a tercet rather than at the end of one. And I guess it's a way of resisting too much tidiness. I suppose the negative way of looking at it it's like doing an off rhyme when you haven't been able to find it. I mean, I didn't want to milk a stanza for the sake of making a section and with a full tercet. That seemed to me wrong. Even though the sections are in some sense logically distinct from each other in some ways. Yeah. Well, I think it was faceted. It's also a transition device, isn't it? It is. It's meant to be a meditation on a single subject, actually, but from different angles. Right. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, when Win and I were living in Palo Alto there would be kids. Do you remember dogs and kids would periodically get poisoned eating the azaleas and the rhododendron? They'd be taken off to Stanford Hospital and we'd hear about them. But the deer love my azaleas. It's all quite sad. Embedded in our conversation so far or embedded in the poems that we've read are certain themes that it's obvious are even from the small sampling you've seen recur in Linda's poetry regularly but one place in which they recur I'm thinking now about the sort of what could we call it the sort of the lament about the physiological lament the lament about the realities of our physical life and the accidents we suffer shows up in so many different contexts in her work but one of the most powerful ways in which they show up as a scene in this poem in the reference to your own daughter is the way in which this concern about the body's frailty converges with what I'll call the biographical or the autobiographical and I think we haven't yet sort of looked at a poem in which what I call your ancestral saga appears and I thought we might do one of those. How about constitutional which has another virtue for us something that we haven't done this is a very partial view of the range of Linda's poetry and I apologize for that but I have my own limitations and there are certain aspects of her work that have addressed me so deeply that I have focused on them and what happened a constitutional will seem familiar even if you've never only seen the poems that we've just looked at today but you'll also think I think seeing an enlargement in two directions one is what I've called the Gregerson ancestral saga and there are a number of poems that do this at constitutional with particular energy and disturbing force but what we also see happening here is a turn toward what I'm the more overtly political and some of Linda's poems are very directly political poems and I think you can see in this poem something of the way those two come together and I was hoping after you read that you might talk a bit about that. I should say first that I feel very queasy about doing this sort of family poem. I'll just say that. The kind of ethnic recidivist sort of like I'm so moved by the spectacle of my own roots I mean I feel very anxious and wary about it. I try not to do it too much. That's so celebratory, Linda. The portrait of your father that emerges in the books is hard. No, no, no, I don't, no. Okay, fine. You're pretty tough on these people. It's not, it's not as... I love them. It's not saccharine praise. It's pretty tough-minded. This is called constitutional and I should say it wasn't quite written on assignment but David Barbers said, you know, we're trying to put together some poems for whatever the summer issue of the Atlantic was at one point. He said it's with like America as their theme. He said, do you have anything? I said, why? I don't know what was this thing. I was thinking about writing. So anyway, constitutional. Constitutional. And it's an elegy. It's a wonder. They didn't all of them die of the sun those days. Remember Ali's forehead in the backs of his hands. The fair haired sons of Norway in their bright Wisconsin fields. The map of blessed second chances writ in tasseled corn. The damage writ in melanin. I never could stand it, my father would say, by which he meant the morning constitutional. The dose of electric fencing all he found was just the cure for frozen joints. But joints be damned. The rest of it my father loved. He'd cast about for a portion I could manage. Maybe Linda could fetch the cows. Poor man. Little thought how quickly the race declines. Our selves and our posterity. It all alarmed me. Dung slicks, culvert, swollen teat. The single narrow wire above the barbed ones, commotion of flies on the rim of the pale. We're better at living on paper, some of us. Better at blessings already secured. The fence. It was for animals. And insulated quaintly with the species of porcelain knob. That part, at least, I had the wit to find benign like the basket of straw-flaked eggs. A touch of homely caution in the liable deterneness world. Ordain and establish. And breakable too. An old man at his battery-charged devotions double-fisted on the six-volt fence in order to form. A measure of guesswork. A measure of faithful refraining from harm. Let us honour the virtues of form. And all the dead in company, if only not to shame them. This was in the earlier phase of our extraordinary renditions and other bad behaviour on a global scale. And so it seemed like something that actually is meant to be a kind of homage. One thing I wanted to ask... It also had to include that. This is one of my favourite poems of Linda's for many reasons. Like other poems of yours that I very much admire, the sense of a conversation going on between you and the reader is particularly powerful. And there's a moment in the poem where you're making your confessions about what a bad farmer you are. The dung slicks and the culvert and so forth. And then when you finish that little discourse and you say we're better at living on paper, some of us better at blessings already secured, then you say the fence question mark. And clearly you're talking to the reader there. You're saying, oh, reader, I didn't quite tell you about the fence yet. Now this happens in other of your poems. The kind of connection that's implied or required of the reader in order to participate in the poem seems to me a peculiarly intimate one. I'm wondering if this is something that's in your mind when you start to write the poem, or do you begin to feel that you're in... in some of the poems that you're in a much closer dialogue with your auditor than in others? Well, honestly, David, I think some of it has to do with wanting to make sure the poem doesn't rattle on a single pitch of diction or a single kind of, in a single rhetorical posture the whole time that it does that, that it moves. I mean, it's a wonder they didn't know. It's meant to be deeply informal the way it starts, but also to somehow accommodate that and it's got the joints be damned, but it's got sort of higher... he little thought how quickly the... it's got other pitches of diction and those bits from the preamble to the constitution. And so I think that the conversational and the just being able to have a little two-word phrase that's a question... I think it's about breaking momentum rhetorically. It really is. So it's moving in and out of the acknowledged intimacy. It's interesting. It feels really important to me. You know, this is connected to... Rather than just presuming on it all the time. Right. I hadn't realized how... this is connected to what you said before about how you became bored with left-justified poetry as if there was something simply too... you're in a very good building. We were walking through a very good building for this. We took a tour of Stata. Linda had never seen the Gary building before, so we took a tour of it. And in some ways it seems to me there was a connection. Your poems are much more beautiful and elegant than that ugly thing, but... I get paid much better as well. But I guess what I have in mind is just this... I hadn't realized how important it was to you to keep people on edge, in a sense. Or at least to change registers repeatedly enough so that you don't fall into any pattern. Well, I don't want them... For example, I'm desperately afraid of the Hortatory. But I also think it's kind of... I do think it's possible to get, you know, for intimacy to be too... to be presumed upon. I think having touchstone moments where the registers of the conversation... where the gestures of the conversational enter the poem, that feels really important to me. I guess it is a kind of mobility. I don't mean it... It's not meant to be like ambushes, but rather a sort of mobility. Changes of tonal variation. There's some astonishing moments in some of Linda's poems where she will suddenly address... You'll say, reader? Not I married him, but almost as good as that line. Where that same kind of intimacy comes in. I always experience it as a... both as a surprise, but also as something that draws me to the poem in a way that is very unusual. Not because it never happens in other poetry, but it seems to me to rarely happen in the middle of poems. It really happens that you're surprised by it in the way that we sometimes are in your poetry, as if we know we're in a kind of intimate connection to you because you're sharing complex and disturbing and private and intimate thoughts, and we can even feel the process of your thinking as we follow along. And yet there also still are these surprising moments in which you seem to pull back and either include us in a way that actually says, reader, pay attention, reader, I'm addressing you, as you were implicitly doing with the fence, and then others where you back off that. And I hadn't realized as clearly before what you're partly after are these tonal variations. And part of it's a sort of punctuation as well. I mean, I also... you don't have to know this, but another thing I do sometimes, much to the... Well, what? Trying the patience of my long-suffering husband is I stick him in as a skeptical interlocutor, so I have him say something that punctures. And I know I'm really representing what he really thinks, like a great deal of impatience with Nordic gloom. But I do make it a little more slapstick than he would necessarily be in public. But that's also to sort of... And it's partly wanting... it's partly a form of inoculation, right? I don't want to... I want to... lest I seem to be taking certain stances too seriously. I mean, I understand what you're saying, and I'm sure that... Of course this is true, but I think that you're undervaluing those moments where Stephen or other moments like that interrupt the flow. Maybe we could give them an example. How about the title of the new book? We actually have it here, so you can actually follow it along. I think you can hear this one. I really do. I think you can hear this one. But if you want to look at it, you can. But the point is that this poem contains one of those moments where Stephen interrupts her. It says, come on. It's basically about my driving, but it's all a family joke. But it does something else. As you listen to it, I think you'll find this interesting, because it does something else. I mean, it grounds the poem in the moment of its composition. It makes you aware of the circumstances of the writing in a way that creates a new form of self-reflexiveness in the text that I think is even more important in a way than the things you've been saying about it. But it's a very resonant strategy that, like all of her things, uses sparingly because, obviously, not something to overuse, but it always seems to me to happen with great effect. So here's an instance of that. This is actually a titled poem in my new book. And as you'll hear immediately, it was written in the wake of the last presidential election. And you can see the political coming in, too. And for those of you who are not seamstresses, selvedge refers to that. When you buy fabric by the bolt, it refers to that part of the weaving that alters on the edge to keep this fabric from unraveling. That's what selvedge is, one. So door-to-door, among the shotgun shacks in Cullowy and Waynesville in our cleanest shirts, and ma'am, and excuse me, we're all but second nature now. And as one woman comes to the door, she must have weighed 300 pounds. Would you be willing to tell us who you plan to vote for, we say? And she turns around with Everett, who are we voting for? The black guy says Everett. The black guy, she says, except that wasn't the language they used. 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. Two. At which point, the speaker discovers as if the lesson were new, she has told the story at her own expense. Amazing, said my sister's chairman's second wife, to think what you've amounted to considering where you're from, which she imagined was a compliment. One country, friends, where when we have to go there, as depend upon it, fat or thin, regenerate or blinker to the end, we shall, they have to take us in. I saw three, a river full of geese as I drove home across our one-lane bridge. Four hundred of them easily, close massed against the current and the bitter wind, some settled on the ice, and just the few at a time who'd loose and rank to gather again downstream, as if to paraphrase the fabric every minute bound by just that pulling out that holds the ravelling together. You were driving all this time, said Stephen, counting geese, the snow falling into the river. No. The river about to give itself over to ice, I'd stopped. Their wingspans, had they not been taking shelter here as wide as we are tall? Well, I think I should stop asking questions and let either members of the audience ask questions and also get Linda to read a few more poems. We'll continue until 6.30 either with questions or reading. Any comments, questions? Should we get things going by asking Linda to read a few more? Why don't you give us some... You want me to choose or you choose? You choose one, and I'll choose one. Okay. Why don't we choose one that's still on our list so people can also follow if they like? How about the woman who died in her sleep? Okay. This is the... Yes. This is number two. Well, more medical dramas again. Linda's cancer diagnosis happens, you know, in section three. Okay. And it begins as an ecstastic poem. There's a fabulous photographer whose name is Jeffrey Silverthorn, who did a sequence he called morgue work. And he did, at the time anyway, live in Indiana. I don't know if he's still there. He's a Midwestern photographer. And they were extraordinary photographs of post-autopsy bodies in the county morgue. The woman who died in her sleep, which is the title of one of his photographs, one not whip stitch, nor blind stitch, nor any sort of basting stitch I recognize, black cordage, really, piercing its way from pubis to breastbone. Why not? Up to shoulder. The coroner's question flatly left to the body's implacable gray. The part in her hair is jagged, too. Amazing what the flesh can make of all this interruption. You've gathered that she's beautiful. Two. When Megan chose the 15th century sculpture rooms, I realized with some chagrin she hadn't any notion who these people were. The one in blue, I said, is Mary, and the one she's holding in her lap till Megan got the gist of it. And here, I said, is how you'll know him when they take him down, five wounds. But my five-year-old daughter saw six. Have I told you? Do you know for yourself how the sweetness of creation may be summed up in a lightfall on a young girl's cheek? The wound she hadn't yet learned to ignore, the mortal one, was where the child had once been joined to something else. Three. She'd had worse news, the pale one. She'd felt terror sink its claw and hold, and never had she lapsed into so lumpish a cliché. The bright young surgeon showed her how to read this dark transparency, the tell-tale script of cells gone wrong. And like some dull beginner, she began to lose the edge of things and had to sit, I'm sorry, I had to drink some water. I'm not like this, I can hear. The punishment for self-absorbed, she thought, is self-absorbed. And all this black periphery is chiefly lack of blood flow to the brain, poor brain, its body too. Is this, this old embarrassment the way I'll know? Four. The woman in the photograph on a pallet made of wood. And though her abdomen appears to have been packed again in haste, and though the breast is badly sewn, her hips are smooth parentheses, her cheekbones high, her lovely arms disposed as though in langer a luxurious thought. They took my mother's teeth away. They had to, I can understand. The morphine, I'd bullied them into providing, was meager and frequently late. And so my mother's face was not the face I knew. But reader, her fine forehead was a blessing on the place. The lesson, though I'm clumsy here, has something to do with beauty and use. The sculptors whose grammar my Megan recites a hole in each hand, a hole in each foot, an entry point beneath the breast believed we get our bodies back. In all the urgent calculus that death can found and dissolution expedite was lavished in that era on this one account. What of the fingernails? What of the hair, the menses, the milk, the proud flesh worn for heaven's sake? Who'd want, you see, the body oblivious, body on which the stern salt tied had left no mark? When Megan hadn't yet been born two months to go, my ankles swelled and doubled over every pair of shoes I wore. Unseemliness, you seem to have something in mind. Imagine, said the people once, a world where nothing is thrown away. This is actually the other resurrection of the body poem. It's secretly stashed in there. That's kind of a nice beginning. Why don't you choose one that takes us out of the cancer ward? Out of the cancer ward. Oh, I could do something. Let's see. I'm going to do something here. The one thing you haven't discussed that I mentioned that I would be happy if you sort of addressed this, maybe you could do it in connection to a poem. One poem that would work this way and no moon which is on here, but there may be other. I'm going to do a short poem first, then no lie and no moon. I don't write short poems very often, but I try, and it also has the virtue of being a loved poem to my husband. You have to remember the part about when we were kids and we walked down sidewalks and there was this like, if you step on a crack, you break your mother's back, if you step on a line. It always freaked me out that stuff anyway. This is called slight tremor. The fine fourth finger of his fine right hand, just slightly, when he's tracking our path on his iPhone or repairing the clasp on my watch, I will not think about the myelin sheath. Slight tremor only, transient. So the flaw in the pavement must have been my mother's back. And is no lie and no moon here? Yes, it's in here. Yeah, here we are. Okay. So this begins in the, some of you will have been there in the Jewish Museum in the city of Prague and it's got one of the rooms assembles and displays a series of the children's drawings that were done by the Jewish children who had been rounded up and taken to Terezín or Terezínstadt, the concentration camp outside that city. I was struck in particular by this one because I spent my life, I think at least once a day about the play within a play in Midsummer Night's Dream because I think it is the greatest moment in world literature. So I was very struck. They must have been doing plays in the concentration camp as well because Jung stepped on, Paulic, his drawing was of a scene from that play within a play and this is called No Lie and No Moon. But there she is, Fair Thisby, twice. The once in Döndel and embroidered blouse, then letter by letter, Thisby on the wall above, heart with arrow glossing the name, the heroine's affliction and by consequence her claim on us. Cheap paper, much yellowed these 60 years. The crayon wielded not so much with art as with the art of open-heartedness which makes me think her lover himself so easily undone by words and by an open heart. Unlikely to have scorned the hand that formed the letters misproclaiming Priam just above his head. What's pyramids to you, child? Or you and all Teresian shdard to Thisby? That someone had the wherewithal to find the children crayons at all or guide them through theatricals? That someone, not just someone but the sum of them, the common wheel inside this unfamiliar and malignant place, this camp, could find the heart to care for pictures, plays with inner play and injudicious lovers long before their keepers thought to use such things as camouflage. The Red Cross sent observers once and caring for such things to make of them something like a nursery for the yet to be exterminated soul of Central Europe is a not, not even malice on the grand scale has dissolved. Thisby knows so little of the world as yet. The bit she can see through the chink in the wall has made her heart beat faster in its cage but little as she knows, she knows the one thing. There are forms for this. His eyes will be like lips like she is not required. No more than the guards who have loaded the trains to make the whole thing up from scratch. The transcript and that stubborn other thing that gets transcription slightly wrong if only rarely in our favor young Steppan left the lion out. I can see this is one of those long sentences that's way way strung out. I was thinking of this poem when we talked about your use of grammar, in order to get this poem you have to go back to the, there's that one very long sentence. It's a long sentence. Where does it begin Linda? That someone had the wherewithal. You know, it's also that it's partly, I think I'm stalling on letting those children be killed and partly it's trying to, what is it that someone had the wherewithal I mean there's something that it's a hard moral challenge to know what to say about the face of that courage, that faith in culture in the face. It didn't keep those children alive but kept something alive for a time. So part of it is actually that it's suspended, it's kind of cantilevered that, I think of the, you know when there's this long dependent set and in this instance it's a noun clause it is over an abyss it's about to tip, the sentence is always about to like you know not make it and I guess for me a good faith measure is that it actually also always has to be about something that is the dilemma in thinking through. In here, what is it? So the delays and the retardations are part of the emotional texture. Yeah. And it's what is it to be said about that kind of that going on, that you know leading the children in drawing classes at death's doorstep. It's incredibly moving as a spectacle of what community is for and can do and must do and also profoundly about the limits of what it can do and what it can't prevent. So part of it is trying to you know it was getting more and more in trouble about knowing what to say and yeah. One thing to claim on its behalf. That was magnificent Linda. One of the things that struck me was the way in which Linda's explanation changed the poem. As part of the experience of reading this poem is not knowing about Therese and Stott. Not knowing exactly what she's describing until it discloses itself later in the poem but she gave that away when she explained it because and I think the reason is listening is much harder than looking on the page. You can't go back. But if you imagine reading this poem without Linda's explanation about where, who this child is. I mean there's a hint of course because you see his name and his dates but... He was twelve when he died. But you know it takes a while before that meaning fully unfolds for the reader and I think that is part of the terrible power of this remarkable poem. Give us another one. Okay. You know one thing we've not touched on Linda or what I'll call sort of your professorial poems, your learning poems. Maybe you want to do one of your dido... About book... And you can explain maybe why dido was important. Why dido? Yeah, well why dido? I think because dido has haunted western imagination and for real reason. But the practical reason is that I was kind of commissioned by a composer and dramatic soprano. Wonderful composers, Susan Botti who herself had been commissioned to write a series of songs and we talked and talked about what that might be and where we might go for subject matter and finally selected the story of dido and so I wrote a series of lyrics in her voice but dido is... Dido is empire's guilty conscience. I mean she was a great imperialist herself too after fleeing from tires she's sort of with great resilience and no little amount of cunning built a city in North Africa but then of course was undone by Anias who with whom she fell in love who left her because he had to go on to better things and bigger things and so she represents but she really comes back a lot in our period in the early modern especially but she's a recurrent figure and I think she's the she's the discard and this is what it cost to get where we are I think that's one of the functions she has and one of the reasons she's fascinating so I'm not going to read the whole thing Not the only dido poem you've written either No it's not the only dido poem I've written but maybe two or three of these and then I'll stop and so here's section one the four stays oh it's called dido refuses to speak because it takes its present moment that moment when Anias comes upon her in the underworld and says oh my god so you are dead the rumors I heard were true I'm so sorry I didn't mean to make you despair and dido like who'd been begging him to stay last time he saw her alive turns and doesn't speak so here she's speaking but it's called dido refuses she's not speaking to him one the four stays the stern sheet the benches the yard the wooden pins to which the oars are bound with strips of leather he explained this thul and loom I thought the words were just as lovely as the workings and I thought I knew the principle the moving forward facing where you've been the muscled quarrel with the muscled sea like love that sweet againstness and the linen sail happy the weaver whose work might bedeck the chamber where we lay us down how strange it seems from just a little distance the living tree the axe the chisel cattle whom we kill and skin also that they may live again on water but including us too because she'd never not been there my Anna I can feel her now the back of her hand as I hold it against my eyelid I've always loved to touch with eyes because her voice was all the traction I'd ever required because so long as earth contained precisely that measure of temple to eyebrow eyebrow to lip I knew I had a home it was my sister I made to make the thing ready the firewood in its lofty escarpment the torches, the oil and she of course when she asked what I meant to do to whom I lied I meant my bitter heart to foul the wind that filled his sails I did not ask what if the wind should change direction who would choke and one more once in a narrow garden I encountered a thing I'd known before a scent I had no words for it not citron though it bore that solvent aptitude not anise though it harbored a touch of clay a fragrance I had known as in another life or this life but before the daily watering down which left me half transported on an undistinguished plot of ground so think what it meant when he began to speak the story we'd stowed as ballast on the fleeing ships had painted on our temple walls the very lights and darks we had depended on to make the place less strange and on a stranger's lips to whom the story properly belonged or he to it is there a difference and poor dido mere excurses for them both Thank you, Linda