A CONVERSATION WITH LINDA GREGERSON | by David Baker

[This interview is part of a series of conversations with authors who have work in KR. It is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.]

Linda Gregerson is one of the most original and vibrant of contemporary American poets. Born in 1950 and raised in Cary, Illinois, she received her B.A. from Oberlin College, M.A. from Northwestern University, M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Currently she holds the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professorship at the University of Michigan and teaches in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She also teaches frequently at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, in Gambier, as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Gregerson's poetry collections include Fire in the Conservatory (Dragon's Gate, 1982), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), and Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). For her poetry she has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and she has received the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, and many other distinctions.

In addition to the contributions of her poetry, she is an influential literary scholar. Her The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic, appeared in 1995 from the Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, and Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry, was published in 2001 as part of the Poets on Poetry series from the University of Michigan Press.

David Baker: Linda, thanks so much for the chance to talk about your two poems in the new Kenyon Review. They are splendid poems, both of them, and we are very glad for the opportunity to print them. I'd also like to use this occasion to talk about your forthcoming book of poems, Magnetic North, and to range further into other interests of yours, like teaching, Renaissance poetry and scholarship, the theater, more.

But let's start with "Over Easy." This is one of my favorite new poems of yours. I have a few specific questions about this poem, but I wonder if there's anything you wish to say about it first-about its origin or impetus or whatever you might wish to say to begin.

Linda Gregerson: Well, in the first place, you are very kind to overlook the speaker's comments on the Ohio landscape, not to hold them against me, I mean. And I should also say I regard that landscape - northern Ohio, northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, southern Michigan, not the lushness and lovely elevations of points further south and north, but the sectioned-off flatness of farmlands and shopping malls-as my unerasable imaginative home. But yes, the origins: a car trip, and perhaps the purest sensuous incitement I've ever tried to get down on paper. At which I flatly failed, by the way. It was that radiant sliver of limpid tangerine: I could taste it in the back of my throat, and it brought such pure enchantment. Midwestern Proust. I spent ages trying to identify the sense-memory, which was multiple and mildly mortifying: a dress I had in high school, a pair of fishnet stockings, a lipstick (it was the sixties, remember; we all looked ghastly!), and a sort of sherbet-on-a-stick we used to call a "Push-Up." Quite a farrago, and of course I had to ditch it all. But I tried to keep the impetus, that primitive thing that comes before speech and way before aesthetic judgment.

DB: There are things in "Over Easy" that resonate with your larger body of work-the family narrative, the voice concurrently tender and intellectual, the persisting turn toward conscience or toward something like social connection or civic adhesion. But rarely in your poems is the speaker, simply, moving. Have you noticed? Here she's in her car with her daughters, blasting the stereo, as they range across those "scabrous fields" of Ohio. Your poems are nearly always underscored by a tension between velocity and impediment, to be sure; but the velocity is usually intellectual. In "Over Easy" it's also literal, physical. She is on the move.

LG: Ah, you don't overlook the comment on the landscape! But you're right about the movement, and I'm afraid it doesn't speak well of me that I'm so rarely able to imagine a speaker in physical motion. I suffer from the can' t-chew-gum-and-walk syndrome: it takes something remarkable to make me notice the world if I'm trying to move through it. The beginning of the poem is meant to be more than a little at my own expense.

DB: I guess I asked about movement because I think one of the central things about this poem is its trope of dispersal, "our sorry dispersal." Physical movement and losing control-like that important image of the egg, broken and running. This is the anxiety or the fear over a loss of influence. So much speed, so much time passing quickly. It's also the parents' abiding nightmare, isn't it?

LG: I'm not sure I'd call it "nightmare," though God knows nothing makes one feel the passage of time more keenly than staking one's heart to a child. But your larger insight is deeply right: beneath the domestic comedy is meant to be something darker. It's an appalling confession the speaker makes, to wish to "be rid of" any parcel of time in this brief life, and yet we do it all the time. Perhaps the fear of tedium is one of the most durable legacies of scabrous fields.

But I cannot blame the fields for my own failures of attention. The Reformers I study in the other part of my life would have said that boredom is a sin, and that seems to me to be much closer to the truth. "Sorry dispersal" is Augustine. Or rather, it's Augustine by way of a marvelous essay by Margaret Ferguson; the other italicized parts of the poem are Augustine altogether. I felt quite driven to Augustine as I tried to capture that preternatural transition of sunset and silhouette. There's a passage in the eleventh book of the Confessions where the author writes a sort of phenomenology of time. His example is the recitation of a psalm, the passage of the verse through expectation, attention, and memory. I think it's no accident he draws his example from a sacred poem. The great mystery, of course, is that cusp we call the present, which has always escaped me, except, perhaps, in the context of a poem or the voice of a child. The keenest edge of mortality, yes, but blessing rather than nightmare.

DB: Perhaps blessing and nightmare? That seems to be the dynamic tension that turns inside your work. "Over Easy" is remarkable for its turnings, as one scene, one image, one idea, morphs into the next. You seem to do such things so naturally. I know, Yeats's lesson in "Adam's Curse" reminds us that the natural is an achievement of great labor. The apparent ease with which you turn your poems must be a result of that kind of work.

"Prodigal" offers an even more stunning transfiguration. How can a young woman, a girl with such plenty and such hope, be driven to such hopeless or impoverished behavior? The first magic of the poem derives from how you adjust her portrait from "the plentiful mass" of her hair to the shock of her cutting herself.

LG: Cutting, anorexia, all these ghastly varieties of self-harm: they are not chiefly practiced by children who cannot get enough to eat or have just seen their village burned by hostile forces; they are diseases of plenty. And they are real. Real suffering. We cannot make them go away by pointing to their unreasonableness.

DB: This poem connects in my imagination to others of your poems that represent, and speak in behalf of, the young in their afflictions. In "The Resurrection of the Body" we witness a young helmeted boy, bashing his head against the wall of his hospital room; in "For the Taking" we find a young girl sexually abused by her "bad uncle." Elsewhere there are children ill, stricken, helpless, speechless. Here you render such pathos and tenderness ("I've known her since her heart could still / be seen at work beneath // the fontenelles") for the young cutter. The tension of paradox again: Her fortunate lot in life, this well-to-do American girl, is also the cause of her shame and her suffering. Would you like to speak to this major impulse in your poetry?

LG: One of my friends, a sociologist, said to me once in another context (she was teaching a course on Disability and the State) that a culture can be measured by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. Somewhere prior to analysis, somewhere very elemental indeed, I feel the world can be measured by how it treats its children. I cannot bear the harm we do to them; it makes me wild with grief. And there's nowhere else to go with such grief-I mean one can, one must, try to do some practical good in the world but it's always such a pittance-so I go to words.

DB: Words indeed. The second and third stunning transfigurations of "Prodigal" come toward the end, when the young girl hurting herself turns into words herself, taking the scissors "to that perfect page," and then turns, again, into the very world, into "her other body": the maternal or feminized earth, of which we are all a part, destroying ourselves. The whole world is cutting itself to pieces in its shame. I was simply not prepared for the complexity of this trope. Yet it felt, even on first reading, entirely right. How did this ending come about? Was it early or late in the process of composition when you determined how the poem should terminate?

LG: It was very late. I was stuck for a long, long time. It's always the hardest, and the truest, part of composition for me: reaching a point where the poem needs to go more deeply into itself by going elsewhere. Authentically elsewhere, somewhere I haven't pre-plotted. I often find that point by writing slightly beyond it, into a fulfillment that's too predictable. So I have to cut back to the precipice and be stranded there for a while. It's a very uncomfortable place; it drives me crazy. And it's where the thing either does or does not become a poem.

DB: Let's set aside, for now, the issue of subject matter, but let's talk some more about how something becomes a poem. Readers of your work-those many of us who've followed your poetry especially since The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep in 1996-are likely to be fascinated by these two poems, as by nearly all the poems in your forthcoming book, Magnetic North, for their adventurous ranging-out into more formal variety. In your last two books you developed and perfected a sinuous stanza form, a very flexible, spacious indented triad stanza.

What did that triad permit you to do, or to explore? And why have you left it to move into further kinds of formal designs? How do all of these formal tactics or practices help your writing, as you say, to become a poem?

LG: That tercet quite flatly saved my life. Before I found it, and I found it simply by playing around with a thousand variants, I had written in "block stanzas," everything flush left, and had become very unhappy indeed with the result. Those rectangular blocks were deeply falsifying, I thought -- for me, that is. They were airless; they completely obscured the cadences I'd tried to embody in syntax. The tercets were the first formal vehicle I found that seemed to me to be properly flexible, and true. Especially important was that second, deeply indented line, the "pivot line" as I conceived it, often only a single metrical foot long. It gave me a kind of skeletal resistance, something that syntax could work against, and thus it became a true generative proposition, not just a kind of packaging. The lineation produced the poem.

And as with any codependency, it got to be too much. I began to worry that I knew that stanza too well, knew not only the music but the shape of the cognitive or affective discoveries it tended to incite. So I've tried to experiment again.

DB: In all of your poems, the sinuous form and stanza permits you a kind of play. There must be a formal corollary between the concrete artifact of your style and the rigor or method of thinking itself. Your sentences and lines unwind, unpack, ravel and unravel, in and out. This feels like a mind at work, musing, pressing. How do you decide on a poem's form, especially in Magnetic North, where there are so many different technical strategies-strategies of line, syntax, stanza? At what point in the composing do you settle on shape?

LG: I have to decide very early; I simply can't write the poem without a provisional shape for the stanza. So I locate the early phrasing, the language with which the poem is to begin, and try to "score" it against (that's a telling confession, no doubt: against) a pattern of lineation. And I throw it out and start again-it has to be on the computer by now - and fiddle with it endlessly until I have something I think will accommodate the pitch of diction, the relative pacing, the formality or informality of the voicing. Line five never, ever gets written until lines three and four are firmly in place.

The first poem I wrote for this new book, the poem called "Elegant," is all over the page; I expect the excessive ranginess was part of a not too subtle effort to convince myself there was "life after the tercet." But it also felt, and feels to me, that the form is somehow suited to the subject, to that blessed little roundworm, C. elegans, and the remarkable story of its embryonic cell lineage. I had in mind a particular graphic-the breakthrough paper that mapped the thousand-and-ninety cells of the embryo and the divisions that produce them was accompanied, in the pages of Developmental Biology, by a twelve-page chart: it looks like a kind of musical score. But I also had in mind the movement of hypothesis and revision that is so beautiful a part of scientific method.

Most of the new poems are more obedient formally: they have a more predictable relationship to the left-hand margin. Though obedience is a relative thing: I am so wedded to asymmetry, it is to me so necessary and native a vocal element, that working in couplets feels wild.

DB: Asymmetry, yes, I see that. Your rhetorical argument and your technical form both tend to unspool, and wind around, and go-in-search-of. But I also note the formality of your method of closure. I guess it's not exactly symmetrical closure, but certainly and frequently a kind of dignity or classical enclosing. I feel quite the opposite, at the end of your poems, than I do at the ending of other poets' scattered or asymmetrical lyrics. I mean, about your endings, the frequency of a final line or phrasing in perfect iambic tetrameter or pentameter. Or your occasional sly internal rhyme at the end. The poems often snap shut like a Shakespearean sonnet.

As I scan through Magnetic North, I count only four poems of the book's eighteen that do not end in a long iambic phrase. Now the iamb is the normative rhythm throughout your poems, but often very loosely so. These endings, though, really formalize the iambic phrase and serve as a remarkable closing gesture. "And then she blows the candle out," finishes one. "I think I'll call this mercy too"; "It's wholly premise, rather like the crusted snow"; and even "Elegant" with its "excessive ranginess," as you rightly call it, concludes with "this thread of in-the-cells remembering made it so."

LG: My cover blown! But you're entirely right of course, and "classical" is the generous way to put it. I work inside a tightly bounded metric; it's all I can do to vary the pattern with dactyls and anapests or to end a clause on an unstressed syllable. That's one of the reasons syntax is so important to me: if the syntactical units expand and contract, if they can be made to move with variable pressure, then there's something at odds with the meter.

DB: Sure, that makes sense, the way the syntax can assist in varying the meter. Your line breaks, too, the uneven procedure of the form, the indentions-all those tactical aspects are part of the poem's internal argument with the regularity of its rhythm.

LG: Yes, thank you, that puts it very clearly.

DB: Let's talk more about Magnetic North. I have been fortunate for the chance to read the book in manuscript and in galleys, to prepare for this conversation. The book delights me for its range (of subject matter and formal architecture, as we are exploring) as well as for its lyrical beauty. You are working at your height. How do you write books? A poem at a time? Or do you conceive of a book's identity early on? How did you put this collection together?

LG: I'm sure if I were a better person I would work more conceptually earlier on, but in fact it tends to be poem by poem at first. And then, if I'm lucky, the poems begin to talk to one another, and I begin to think of a larger arc, and then the last part-the half or third at the end-is written into the larger shape or trajectory.

DB: You mean that some of the final poems come along to you with a fairly clear place in the book? Or that you sense the kind of thing you want a late-written poem to do, in its relationship to the other extant poems?

LG: It's usually a question of proportion, as in, "another splotch of yellow in the lower left, please." One of the last poems I completed for Magnetic North was the quasi-title poem, "De Magnete." In that case, there was a very clear place the poem was required to fill, but it was a conceptual place, not a slot in the sequence.

DB: Can you say what that conceptual place-that idea-was at the time, before you wrote the poem? Did it feel like a gap of some sort? That's a fascinating kind of awareness.

LG: As I mentioned, the first poem I completed for this volume was a long poem, "Elegant," which takes as its subject the investigations of three physiologists, John Sulston, Robert Horvitz, and Sydney Brenner, who happen to have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 2002. I'd located my title-Magnetic North-perhaps a third of the way into the writing of the book. After some missteps, I'd finally located the cover art: a beautiful white-on-white construction by the German artist Günther Uecker. This painting-it is a painting of sorts-consists of hundreds and hundreds of nails pounded into a wooden panel, the whole of it painted white, and the nails projecting two inches or so from the front of the panel. So that the real painting consists of shadows and light: the myriad shadows cast by these little white poles, shadows which seem to organize themselves in patterns but patterns that alter completely when the light source alters. The links among all these elements-the little roundworm and its cell divisions, the microscopy that gives us access to them, the magnetic pole and its ties to navigation, the love letter (scientific and painterly) to partial views, the critique of partial views, the cold beauty of a world that only tenuously aligns with our ability to construe it-these links were vivid in my mind but largely implicit in the manuscript. I needed something with a more explicit link to the title of the book especially. A horrifying baggy monster of motives. So I started reading: about the history of navigation, polar exploration, the search for the magnetic north pole, the general science of magnetism. And when I came to William Gilbert and De Magnete-he published that book in 1600!-I finally had something that, I hoped, could touch the chords I needed to touch without getting hopelessly tangled in them. That unit of the personal-one man's biography, one man's evolving method, one man's curiosity-can be hopelessly sentimentalizing and simplistic, of course, but simplifying units are also very powerful; they give us a through-line; they're hospitable; I've learned not to scorn them.

DB: What do you want this particular book to do for its readers? It will have readers, I am certain of that.

LG: I hope the poems catch something of our common grief for the world as we 've harmed it, and our common gratitude for all the goodness we haven't yet managed to expunge. I hope-I feel like Blanche DuBois, relying upon the kindness of strangers-I hope the patient reader will find, in the quarrel between velocity and stumble, woven surface and fissure or tear, some fleeting approximation of the present tense. I hope-it's outrageous to hope this, but every writer does, I think-I hope the poems, or some piece of them somewhere, even for a tiny bit, can stall the rush to oblivion.

DB: I learn things when I read your poems and your books. I wish that were true more often of the poetry I read. Poetry is not information, to be sure. As Daniel Tiffany reminds us, "Only a fool reads poetry for facts." Yet poetry can contain and pass along knowledge, wisdom, as well as song and the processes of thinking. You seem pretty fearless in your thinking, in the ways your poems include historical data and narratives, medical treatments, specific scientific information, to say nothing of your recreations of theatrical performances and art installations. I tend to think of your work as more inclusive than not, more impure than pure. Is that a fair depiction?

LG: The world is so rich with the cumulative textures of material practice, the intricate dynamics of our own and other people's daily labors, the tenuous workings of human memory-it seems a pity if poetry is to leave them out.

DB: Then what is the relationship, in lyric poetry, between purity and the impure? Or is that a misleading dichotomy from the start?

LG: Certainly there are poets who work on what seems to us the purer end of the spectrum: those for whom the distillations of personal experience and lyric tradition or the rigors of philosophical meditation constitute a durable and continuous medium. For the rest of us, those who treasure the disruptions and "contaminants," the poem has to justify its existence in other ways. What keeps the poem from being merely secondary or after-the-fact? Ekphrastic poetry has a long and honorable history, but I think it should always be uneasy on this ground. The neurophysiologists whose work I all but worship don't need my little lyric after all. But I do think the world needs more of neurophysiology (and history, and equine dentistry, for that matter) than its practitioners and professional explicators are in the habit of providing (they have their own good work to do). I think there are rhythms of thought, fragile propositions about the intersections of human understanding and human habitus, robust intersections of the pragmatic and the sublime, that science shares with art, and I love the thought that poetry can learn from and do homage to its near cousins. The great thing about "facts" (and the scientists are much more sophisticated skeptics than the poets are) is that they put up resistance. Resistance is good for art, and for thinking in general.

DB: You have worked as a teacher for a long time. Your permanent position is at the University of Michigan. What are the specifics of your position there? What do you teach?

LG: My scholarly training is in Renaissance literature, and Michigan has always been wonderful about allowing me to teach an array of courses in that field as well as courses in creative writing. At present, I'm teaching a graduate course with a colleague in the history department on "Religion and Empire in the Early Modern Atlantic" and also an undergraduate course on lyric poetry.

DB: I'm not even going to ask the obvious question, which is how you manage to balance your teaching and your teaching and your writing and all your other familial and professional commitments. Still, I know you also are generous in your willingness to teach elsewhere-at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, for instance, or the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers, or at our own Kenyon Review summer workshop. How do you find the time? Can you explain why people seem to be turning in substantial numbers to these kinds of opportunities to study and to write poetry?

LG: I adore teaching at Bread Loaf and Kenyon and the Warren Wilson residencies; their intensity always astonishes and invigorates me. It's quite remarkable to put aside everything else for a week or two and immerse oneself in the written word and a community of people who care so deeply for it. Writing itself is generally solitary; Judith Grossman once wonderfully described the process as a chronic "social insult." So one hungers for a kind of antidote, I think: some form of being-alone-in-company, or frankly taking a break from aloneness. Pragmatically, of course, many writers spend their working days in other pursuits, and the chance to receive intensive feedback on manuscripts, to share ideas and strategies and reading lists, is invaluable.

DB: At Michigan you come into close contact with some of the finest young poets in the country. It's an impressive program, personal in its size and kind of contact. What are the students like these days? Can you characterize their writing, their reading, their interests? If it's possible to summarize a new generation of poets, what might be some of their strengths and weaknesses?

LG: The students are wonderfully varied in their methods and aesthetics. Some are working on a shattered page, in fragmentary syntax, with conspicuous debts to contemporary music and visual culture. Some are working in a much more restrained and classical vein. Many of them have decided to test the parameters of their own "found forms" by writing from time to time in a received or inherited form, even in rhyme. One is working on a Pushkin-style novel-in-verse. Several are experimenting with performance modes or collaborations with visual artists, videographers, musicians. Many poets now, not just the young but especially the young, are compelled by mixed genres. The possibilities are terribly exciting.

The challenge, predictably enough, lies in tempering all this burgeoning possibility with some meaningful form of stricture. One wants the gorgeous, expanded palette of color and movement but one doesn't want to be a perpetual dilettante. The expansion of methods must somehow lead to freshening or intensification rather than a watering-down. The problem is daunting and thrilling at once: how to locate the hard edge, the limits, the embodied grammar that will give this new work its own center of gravity.

DB: How does one teach someone else to be a poet?

LG: I suppose one teaches everything but that. I try to encourage in my students a meticulous attention to the elements of poetry: to syntax, image, idiom, cognitive pacing, tone. To punctuation, for heaven's sake. I try to teach them to be wary of paraphrase: to hunt down and banish all those poetry-impersonators we all let into our work from time to time, those moments of reporting-on-discoveries-made-elsewhere. I try to encourage them to think on the page. The real poets are those who make use of it all: they hone their craft to accommodate a single, foundational motive, a sort of cognitive hunger. Mindfulness, you might call it, or good faith curiosity.

DB: Linda, one of the other primary forms of your own curiosity involves the theater. You were an actor some time ago, and for years, in Herbert Blau's company Kraken. Many of your poems find their narrative centers literally inside a play. I think of an older poem like "Target," with its juxtaposition of Medea and the crisis in Serbia or of "A History Play." "Eyes Like Leeks" follows Thisby from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the selfsame Thisby who recurs in your new poem "No Lion, No Moon." In fact, your new book features a number of dramatic scenes and tropes-from plays old and new.

LG: The theater taught me how to think. That is, it taught me about embodied thinking. So it was and is foundational. And the play-within-a-play in Midsummer Night's Dream! Right up there with the Book of Genesis!

DB: Even beyond your literal application of dramatic works, the stance or position of the voice of your poems sometimes feels projected in something of the way I imagine an actor's persona must be impelled and clarified. It has to do with articulation, I think, and projection. How do you think about the relation of the theater or performance in the sphere of the lyric poem, with its typical meditative or unvoiced voice?

LG: An actor discovers where to go by going there; she begins with a gesture and then it fills. The ones that fail to fill, you scuttle. In other words, the process is pure induction. It becomes a kind of sense-memory, and I find it a useful antidote to the ways in which "emotion recollected in tranquility" can lapse into paraphrase. We all wash up on this phenomenon from time to time, I think: one may begin with intensest feeling, but if the poem chiefly reports on intensities discovered off the page, the poem remains forever secondary. The lyric poem has to be at risk in the present tense; actors, alas, know all about this.

DB: Your other academic life is as a Renaissance scholar. Your book, The Reformation of the Subject, examines the early modern epic-both Spenser's and Milton's. And other recent critical work looks at Isabella Whitney, among others. What again might you say about the application of your scholarly period to your poetry? Or vice versa? Your poems seem so, well, contemporary. Do you think about, or even engineer, some kinds of overlap? Do you exploit any kinds of difference? I'm thinking beyond the occasional allusion and reference to the Renaissance in your poems.

LG: This brings us back to your previous question, actually, about voicing in the lyric poem. I'm increasingly convinced that this was the great contribution of the sixteenth-century English lyricists, Wyatt especially, which we see coming to such remarkable fruition some eighty years later, in Marvell, Shakespeare, Donne: they experimented with quasi-dramatic gestures of voicing as though these were another kind of trope. Quasi-dramatic: quite separate from the evolution of the Renaissance stage or those later consolidations we call dramatic monologue. Wyatt simply does not sustain a continuous meditative fabric: he allows the lyric surface to be disrupted by the symptoms of personality. He devises the lyric "self" as a kind of intermittent back-formation. He opens up this wonderful, porous rhetoricity, a perpetually shifting contract of expectation between speaker and auditor. I don't-I couldn't possibly-mimic any of it directly, but I do find analogies in the fabric of contemporary American poetry, an effort to push the extra-referential aspects of language toward a kind of performativity.

DB: I am really pleased to thank you here for another variety of your scholarly work-that is, for your participation in a new book I have coedited, with Ann Townsend. Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry has just been released by Graywolf, and of course you know how proud and grateful we are to feature five new essays of yours in this book, a study of some of the fundamental modes of the lyric poem. You have written on the ode, the love poem, the sublime, and the problems of time and of people in the lyric genre.

LG: Radiant Lyre is a great joy to me because of the way in which it emerged: as a kind of public conversation among people who care deeply about the practice and the history of lyric. That engaged conversation is exactly what criticism is at heart.

DB: I agree. An engaged conversation is the essence of criticism. It is also-in a different way-the essence of poetry. We tend to regard the lyric poem as a personal, even private utterance. But in Radiant Lyre, your essay "Life among Others" speaks very persuasively of the social engagement, the social identity, of the lyric. As you say, "The lyric poem is a form of social speaking. . . . It emerges as singular in the process of social encounter and social thinking-through." I take it that social encounter and thinking-through are not merely references to narrative-or to poems with people in dramatic circumstances-but also to poetic form and troping themselves. Is that what you mean? The contours and references, the very substance of a poem are embedded in our social memory and our social exchanges. The self is part of that social fabric.

LG: Yes, indeed: poetic form, like language itself, is a rich and sedimented legacy. We don't make it up from scratch. We may seek to expand or alter the range of possibilities, but we never work outside the basic social fact. There's a theoretical crux at stake here too: I'm among the many people who found it terribly exciting when post-structuralism encouraged us to be skeptical about the post-Enlightenment valorization of the individual. Writers in a number of disciplines began to debunk the notion of an intact inward essence that was ontologically if not temporally prior to culture; they began to speak about the self, or subjectivity, as an effect rather than a premise. It was all rather exhilarating, and of course there was a serious political critique at stake as well. And, as is wont to be the case with All the New Thinking in any of its guises, the insight was largely a revival of an older understanding. Poetry has always known that the subject is a made thing: made by longing for another, made by sorrow and the friction of daily getting-on-with-it, made above all by speech.

DB: Poet, critic, teacher, reader, scholar. You are many things. What do you see happening in poetry right now? Emerson says the genius is someone who can see today. What can you see? What is not happening in our poetry that, perhaps, should be?

LG: On the one hand, I'm quite heartened by the sheer plenitude of contemporary American poetry, its formal and cultural and methodological range. Performativity is at the heart of it, I think-just a minute ago, I called that quality "extra-referential," but perhaps I'd do better to call it compounded reference. So much of the most interesting poetry at present involves an aggravated tension among the various motives and allegiances of language: words as serviceable instruments, words as social glue, words as symptoms, words as smoke screen, words as sympathetic magic. I'm thrilled to see how many poets seem to care about history again, how capaciously the lyric poem is being used to expand our range not just of cultural reference but of cultural recognition. In the beautiful elegy for his mother, "From Amherst to Kashmir," Agha Shahid Ali finds a way to create for all his readers a site of common mourning, a kind of psychic home-and this in the vocabularies of Shiite Islam.

That said, I think we still, we Americans, suffer from underdevelopment when it comes to poetry and the contested, large-scale differentials of power we often refer to as "politics." Poets are dreadfully behind the writers of fiction in this regard, more so than the varying aptitudes of literary genre would require. We're desperately afraid of moral earnestness. But why should that be the reigning specter? We need somehow to enlarge and deepen the terms of engagement.

DB: Yes, we do, Linda. And that is what I think your poetry succeeds in doing for us all

LINDA GREGERSON’s new collection of poems, Magnetic North, will be published by Houghton Mifflin this month.

DAVID BAKER is the poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.

Work that appears on the KR web site is from The Kenyon Review and all applicable copyright restrictions apply.