Read By: Robert Hass and Jorie Graham

<p><em>Jorie Graham on Linda Gregg:</em></p> <p>Reading Linda Gregg’s poems is a unique experience because not only does one hear Linda’s voice in one’s head—if one ever heard her read it was unforgettable—but the voice is actually inscribed into the lines, the syntax, the rhythm, tone, tempo. This is the sign of tremendous formal skill—that one controls the audible voice of the poem right down to its minutest modulations. This is also the signature of a poem which is a lived experience—not the record of one, or the report of one. If there ever were, as Stevens puts it in “On Modern Poetry,” those urgent poems “of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice” they are the adamant, fierce, brave, poems of Linda Gregg. It is hard to describe poems which appear to carry true visionary experience in their marrow. They are, to a certain extent, disincarnate, icy, terse, as-if-dictated. Vision uses abstraction as if it were its natural integument. Vision would seem to use the poet, the poet’s body and voice, as a vessel to get itself expressed, forcibly pressed from the invisible into the visible, from the unknowable into the knowable or the transmittable. And these are certainly characteristics of Gregg’s poems. And yet they are also so deeply poems of the body’s unique knowledge—its intimations, forebodings, fears, lusts and loves. Her poems seem to do it all. It would appear quite impossible for the incarnate to shine so visibly carnate before us—and in so few words. But there she is, as Gregg would say, seeing the vision stand before her. Finally her poems exhibit a fearlessness, a recklessness which seems to be shared by both a way of living and a way of writing—a numinous incandescence, which has to do with searching for the limits of not just what life can be, but also of what language can hold—which might indeed be Too Bright To See. Not any self-indulgent or thrill-seeking recklessness, but recklessness in the name of a deeper reckoning. Until indeed, here she is, always blazing, always alive, Linda Gregg