She Sang of Seeing

I first encountered Linda Gregg’s poems in a workshop at Columbia University in 1982. A fellow student slipped me a folded note with the words too bright to see scrawled inside. After class he handed over a copy of the slim, blue book by that name—Linda’s debut, recently published by Graywolf Press. The collection was like nothing I’d ever encountered: luminous and singular, it sang of seeing.

I was astonished by what she could do with so little. Her poems were lessons in how not to name things, but to instead evoke the outlines of what is seen. Images were simplified, landscapes were drawn from her nomadic life: Marin County, Copenhagen, Greece, Western Massachusetts, New York City, among other places. 

Linda was the mistress of a certain kind of compression. Each of her poems resembles a snow globe, not so much fixed in time as containing all time. Each poem is made by its own weather, ever sturdy, able to draw what it needs when it needs. A system unto itself. 

In the opening lines of the book’s first poem, “We Manage Most When We Manage Small,” we see what W.S. Merwin first saw in Linda’s work—that it “conveys at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance”:

What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.

In the book’s title poem, we find the beginning of  her aesthetic, her manifesto:

I see with difficulty what before was easy.
Perceive what I saw before
but with more tight effort. I am moon
to what I am doing and what I was.
It is a real beauty that I lived
and dreamed would be, now know
but never then. Can tell by looking hard,
feeling which is weed and what is form.

I can’t remember when I first met Linda. What I do remember is her lilting, yet grounded, voice. She was a sprite, but she was fierce; she was a spirit, but she was on fire. We were a small gang of New York City poets who looped in and out of poetry readings, classes, and book parties, piling into taxis, trying to get from one end of Manhattan to the other. Linda folded in, game for any adventure and up for staying up all night. While she centered herself in her poems precisely to disappear into them, with us she did not want to be at the center, did not take up any air. She was the air.

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Linda published six slim, idiosyncratic collections: Too Bright to See (1981), Alma (1985), The Sacraments of Desire (1991), Chosen by the Lion (1995), Things and Flesh (1999), and In the Middle Distance (2006). Her New and Selected appeared in 2008, eleven years before she died of cancer in 2019. Read back-to-back, these books reveal a few stylistic leaps, yet Linda’s project remains singular: she is interested in what lasts—and, in particular, what lasts not by accident or despite human folly but by virtue of its sacredness.

In her work she often chooses absence, marked by incomplete sentences, omitted verbs, whole poems bereft of obvious metaphor. Her poems can read like lists of observations, as if the speaker is standing before a painting. Consider these lines from “The Last Night in Mithymna”:

Wind heaving in the trees.
My room quiet and warm.
Me on a thin mattress,
looking at the full moon.
The sky black around her face.

By keeping the subject from her lines, she instead allows the world to speak louder. By leaving out verbs, she sets up her version of memento mori. Without metaphor, the poem relies on other variables such as syntax, 
repetition, and music.

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In her essay “The Art of Finding,” Linda notes: “To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.” It is this seeing, this finding, that we are given in her work, as if we too discover alongside her. Her method of adding yet another fragment, another piece of the puzzle, marks us as collaborators.

At a reading at Indian Valley Colleges in Novato, California, in 1976, she described her process for writing poems: 

Maybe it just takes a minute actually to write. But the sense of it is, metaphorically, that I write the poem and it takes me a long time—like walking a long way to the end of the poem. And near the end, my intelligence is running like crazy catching up. And that’s what makes the form of the poem, I think, and gets on top of the poem, and is able to see the poem from on top. That usually happens right at the very last minute.... My allegiances are very much with that person who’s running to catch up, even though I live very much within the other part of myself.

Over the years, as her books were published, Linda doubled down on her creations. Her snow globes never clouded, even as her undertaking became more unblinking, more unflinching. Her work achieved a spare beauty. In time, certain poems—“Let Birds,” “The Weight,” “Growing Up,” “Chosen by the Lion,” “New York Address,” “I Thought on His Desire for Three Days,” and “Highway 90,” among others—became iconic. Again and again, she found abundance in the minimal, wholeness after the departed, joy in the unselfing of self. She was a poet of extraordinary directness. Each poem is like a small, ancient monolith, unearthed roots and all, as in “The Heart Flowing Out,” which begins:

All things we see are the shapes death makes. 
When we see straightly and hard we see 
with the eyes of death.

There was so much more I wanted to hear from Linda. During our hours-long conversations she mostly shared where she was and whom she had just seen. Like most poets, we never spoke about our process or our current projects. Instead, we gossiped and commiserated over those no longer with us. While I rinsed the day’s buckets and dishes, untangling the phone cord, I could hear each cigarette climbing around Linda’s words. And from time to time, even when I thought she might not be around, I’d call her East Village apartment just to hear the ring disturb the bed, the table, her absence.

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Linda’s interactions with the sacred never faltered. She saw the elemental in all the difficult gods, as if on some ancient, terraced path; she was, as she says, an “intermediary.” Her clear-eyed gaze at the garden—both at weed and the statuary within—was not only crucial, but for her the only way to achieve such luminosity of purpose. Only Linda, always going back to the same place to ask the same question, could have made such precise significance. As she wrote in “The Bounty After the Bounty”:

Having is the mistaken focus of desire.
It is not the point. The statue is
camouflage for the emptiness left behind.

One could argue that, in the end, her idea of beauty killed her. She lived for it no matter the consequences. She chased it ruthlessly, even as she stilled herself; her four months in the desert without speaking, or on the outskirts of a village on a Greek island, or running the horses, walking New England autumns or the downtown loneliness of her New York apartment—what did she abandon in order to find again? It was not silence—for most of us the prerequisite for writing poems. Not joy, or her angelic giggle. Not birds, not love, not words, not touch. Not longing, not beauty.