The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sun 3/22/2009)

Glistening

As I pull the bucket from the crude well,
the water changes from dark to a light
more silver than the sun. When I pour it
over my body that is standing in the dust
by the oleander bush, it sparkles easily
in the sunlight with an earnestness like
the spirit close up. The water magnifies
the sun all along the length of it.
Love is not less because of the spirit.
Delight does not make the heart childish.
We thought the blood thinned, our weight
lessened, that our substance was reduced
by simple happiness. The oleander is thick
with leaves and flowers because of spilled
water. Let the spirit marry the heart.
When I return naked to the stone porch,
there is no one to see me glistening.
But I look at the almond tree with its husks
cracking open in the heat. I look down
the whole mountain to the sea. Goats bleating
faintly and sometimes bells. I stand there
a long time with the sun and the quiet,
the earth moving slowly as I dry in the light.

Linda Gregg

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Linda Gregg was born in Suffern, New York, and grew up in Marin County, California. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University.

Her first book of poems, Too Bright to See, was published in 1981. Since then, she has published several collections of poetry, most recently In the Middle Distance (Graywolf Press, 2006), Things and Flesh (1999), Chosen by the Lion (1994), The Sacraments of Desire (1991), Alma (1985), and Eight Poems (1982).

About Gregg's work, the poet W. S. Merwin has said, "I have loved Linda Gregg's poems since I first read them. They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance."

Gregg's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writer's Award, as well as multiple Pushcart Prizes. She was the 2003 winner of the Sara Teasdale Award and the 2006 PEN/Voelcker Award winner for Poetry.

She has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She currently lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.


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:hi:

RL

:)

:hug:

RL

Close as I've ever gotten to crashing. :(

:D

RL

didn't have the man-bait parked in the driveway. ;)

:)

:shrug:

RL

Oh, man, what is this, 6 degrees of separation, Pittsburgh poetry edition?

I had no idea. She's in that book I bought off Amazon.

:loveya:

RL

p.s. “Linda Gregg brings us back to poetry. She helps us see how we can once again engage the sublime and the tremendous, in our polluted and corrupt time. Her subject is loss and separation and the intense search for redemption, which she is able to realize through a profoundly honest, and moving, language. She is original and mysterious, one of the best poets in America.”
—Gerald Stern

"Pittsburgh has its shit together."

;)

:hug:

RL

Nothing's perfect.

:loveya:

RL

:donut: :hi:

:hi:

RL

Very nice.

:hi:

RL

Ah, wonderful!

So ethereal, and full of light...

Thank you...

:hi:

:hi:

RL

She paints with words and the imagery
is bold and beautiful.

Thanks so much!

:) :hi:

Good to see you...

:hi:

RL

Thank you, Retro!

:hi:

and you're welcome...

:hi:

RL