“Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery…” Perhaps. Some time ago I found myself reading/trying to decipher, some of Linda Gregg’s work. I come away from my experiment in imitation-in-order-to-understand, more confused, really. I have absolutely no idea what Gregg is doing, or what Graham and others are doing in burying imagery under abstraction. I wanted to see if I could take several of her poems and make use of their formulas– in the first case of the “When I say x, I mean y”– and I come away feeling that the original is precious, i.e. a kind of preening sophistry– big words, big ideas, half-grounded in concretion. Sound and fury going where?
I ran across her poem Resurrection and it baffled me too. So I wrote Fiate Vitae– revealing myself as a hopeless Romantic as in hybrid nature poet….
Two Derivations from Linda Gregg
#1
After “The Apparent”
When I say invisibility I don’t mean not seeing.
I mean the way a ghost is made when a heart is pierced by an arrow.
As the moon dies when we look at at. In the meaning
of indivisibility by intention, which we translate as the keeping
of something whole, an orange, an old spoon.
The space in which we love may be a distance
even when presence holds it, unbreachable and sobbing.
Translucent in the way we see old hands
As we become more like the mountains:
I mean incandescence. As when my dog and I
find each other. Oh, there is no turning away
from love
back into the half-dark of the fields.
It is all fall down as we burn.
#2
Fiat Vitae– Let There Be Life– after Gregg’s “The Resurrection”
.
Let dawn break upon the fields.
Let underground water
perfuse the rippling grass.
Permit the grey, high-hipped mares
to sate themselves
So that their dream-weary aging
ends. Let the rotting, leaning posts last
one more year, even though there will be a forfeiture
of the symmetry of fence and sky. Let all things
endure until we do not. Let everything thrive
the purple crowns of alfalfa, the cattails in the creek
all in its season within us, life unto life,
quickened, luminous,
Imperfect and redeeming
Loquaciously Yours 
I love Linda Gregg’s poetry. Probably her first book, Too Bright to See, the most. I hear, in her poems, at least in some of them, something almost oracular, a stunning kind of clarity. A voice like a bare taut wire.
When I first read her poems, I read many of them out loud. This likely has something to do with the qualities I find in them.
I’ve felt this gradually less with her more recent work. Gradually her poems seem to have taken on a little more softness, or slackness. I still find in her poems the qualities I originally liked, though not quite as much.
A lot of it, I think, has to do with the strange fragment-like sentences she often uses, which give her poems a sharp clipped rhythm and movement. This anyway how they often sound to my ear. I hear the same quality in some of the passages of the two poems of your here.
I find in her poems an inexhaustible light, and sky, and edges of rock. (She’s spent periods of time living in the Greek islands, and many of her poems draw in some way on that experience.)
I heard Gregg read, years ago, in St. Paul at Hamline University. Hearing her actual speaking (or poem-reading) voice accentuated the oracular quality for me even more. It confirmed for me what I’d hear when I first read her poems myself.
*
BTW, thanks for your comments in my blog today.
Thanks for such a thorough comment, Lyle. xxj