The New Yorker Reflects on Linda Gregg's Poems in the Magazine

"The award-winning American poet Linda Gregg, who began contributing to The New Yorker in 1975, died on Wednesday, at the age of seventy-six," writes Hannah Aizenman in a short piece that looks back on those contributions. "Her poems in the magazine exemplify the consummate craft and oblique, elastic intelligence that she honed throughout her career." More:

Gregg’s interest in contradiction and her remarkable gift for lyric tension emerge as early as “The Beckett Kit” and “Goethe’s Death Mask,” which both slyly interrogate the relationship of artistic composition to violence and suffering. The former nods to the titular playwright’s absurdism, ironizing the speaker’s quixotic pursuit of meaning in a world of senseless cruelty; the latter draws an unsettling connection between pain and poetry, musing, “If the happiness lasts, / it is the smoothness. The part / we do not notice. The language he made / was from the bruises.” The echo of “smoothness” in “bruises” is typical of Gregg’s acute yet playful ear; her work explores language’s textures through sound in tandem with signification... 

Read on at the New Yorker.