ARTS

Alumna, faculty poets to read

New writing a strong presence on campus

by Rumaan Alam

The last two weeks have seen a hectic schedule of performances in dance and theater, but next week, one of the other arts on campus is catching up. Poet and alumna Linda Gregerson will read Thursday, followed by a reading next Saturday by three faculty members all connected to the Creative Writing Department. Professor of English and Creative Writing David Young, Professor of Creative Writing Martha Collins and Reference Librarian Jessica Grim will all gather to read from their most recent collections.

Gregerson, OC '71, teaches poetry and literature at the University of Michigan, where she is the director of the MFA program in creative writing. Gregerson's first book, Fire in the Conservatory, was published in 1982 and followed 14 years later by her most recent collection, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep. Linda Gregerson

In her most recent book, Gregerson offers readers surprise after surprise. The physical space of her poems invites the reader to truly inhabit the poem, to savor its every word, but the compelling subject matter pushes the reader to read on, to get to the heart of the poem, and swallow it whole. Consequently, poems which take up three pages of the slim volume slip by quickly, and quietly beg for a re-reading. The book as a whole reads quickly, but not lightly. As a reviewer is quoted on the cover, one wishes it were longer.

At the same time, there is an exhaustion about some of these poems, a breathlessness, a silence which suggests they might have been difficult to write and certainly renders them difficult to read.

In "Target," Gregerson writes "He must/ have been asked/ what he hoped for or thought// while he lay in the high half-light with his/ gun/ a sniper in the frozen hills whose// angle on the heart and hearth's acute. I am happy, / he said, to kill a child crossing //the street with his mother." Earlier in the poem, in an equally chilling moment, the mother bathing her young child in the sink sees the dangers all around: "the porcelain rim, the drain/ with its food scraps,/ the outlet, the sponge, the thousand// mortal dangers in the kitchen drawer."

Several of the poems focus on the relationship between mother and child, as in the moving "With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath." It's a powerful piece in which the speaker attempts to relish a moment with her daughter while understanding how soon she will be grown. "She will rather// die than do this in a year or two/�and lobbies,/ even as we swim, to be allowed to cut// her hair. I do, dear girl, I will/ give up/ this honey-colored metric of augmented// thirds, but not (shall we climb/ on the raft/ for a while?) not yet."

Gregerson knows well the territory of family. Her poems also have adult speakers addressing their mothers and fathers, and one particularly haunting work, "For the Taking," has a speaker recount the incest between her sister and her uncle. "My bad uncle did it/ for years, in the back of the car,// in the basement where he kept his guns,/ and we/ ... we would be somewhere mowing the lawn// or basting the spareribs right/ outside..." The poem doesn't flinch, but the reader certainly does.

Gregerson is a powerful and talented poet whose roots are in Oberlin. Aside from seniors reading to celebrate the end of their careers here, and the occasional open mic night, readings by members of the Oberlin community are far too infrequent. Saturday's series of faculty readings will allow students and other members of the community to hear from some of Oberlin's many talented voices.

David Young has published several books during his career, both of his own work, as well as translations of such poets as Rilke and Neruda, and works of criticism. His most recent book is The Clouds Float North: the Complete Poems of Yu Xuanji.

Martha Collins is the author of the collections The Arrangement of Space, The Catastrophe of Rainbows, and her most recent Some Things Words Can Do, which includes her earlier A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet. She directs the Creative Writing Program in conjunction with Pamela Alexander.

Jessica Grim works as a reference librarian in Mudd. She is also a poet who has just published her third collection of poems, called Fray. Grim, a language poet, will offer a course next semester on language poetry through the Creative Writing Department.

Linda Gregerson will read on Thursday, Nov. 19 at 7:30 p.m. in King 106. Martha Collins, Jessica Grim and David Young will read on Saturday, September 21 at 2:00 p.m. in the Co-op Bookstore.


Photo:
Dead?: Don't let the title worry you. While powerful, Gregerson's poems aren't fatal. (photo by courtesy Office of Communications)

 

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Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 9, November 13, 1998

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