Linda gregerson, the poet’s poet, publishes New Poems
Denise Low
Canopy: Poems, by Linda Gregerson Ecco, 2022.
Linda Gregerson’s writing explores the limits of syntax. Her poems are not prose-poems, but they take poetry up to the exact border between stanzaic verse and prose paragraphs. Meters shift the balance as her fulsome lines fall into rhythms. Her diction is rich, never simple exposition. She is a poet’s poet. Amongst the considerable volume of published verse, Canopy stands out as a workshop in the possibilities for the genre.
Canopy’s content is informed by history as well as echoes of historic poetic forms, like regular stanza patterns. These Gregerson refits to construct her own vision, to good effect. As critic Daniel Chiasson writes, “Her poems hack their verbal energy from deep sources in Renaissance poetry and its classical models.” The lyrical tradition is apparent, if greatly modified. In previous collections Gregerson has used her original tercet form of long-short-long lines. Canopy reprises that form in “Horse in a Gas Mask,” which begins: “Browband cheekpiece throatlatch / bit. / Plus all the links and leathers for holding.” Five spaces between words in the first line take the place of standard punctuation—a contemporary substitution and not unique to Gregerson. The poet does invent a new way to accentuate the off-balance effect of three lines by use of a short,
staccato middle line—the one word “bit.” The oddity of a World War I campaign horse’s hideous mask contraption echoes the unsettling language. This hopscotch effect creates a subtext of disorder. It emphasizes the distortions of the first technologicallysophisticated great war, which was supposed to end all wars. The poem goes on to explain, “we’ve read about the mustard gas,”— shorthand reference to the war’s chemical weaponry.
As it proceeds, Gregerson’s narration discloses how the poem responds to a documentary film about the war’s poison gas, and that the masked horse is a photograph embedded in film. This framework is another genre recreated within the poem. The camera becomes the poet’s eye, as the ending lines suggest: “All suited to our purposes. / Camera. / Liquid eye.” The narrative point-of-view shifts from an imagined speaker of the poem to a named technology.
Another invention of Gregerson’s is her use of hyphenation to freeze-frame entire phrases. Here is another line in “Horse in a Gas Mask”: “this latter-day story-by-means-of-moving-pictures.” This word-clump serves as a single object of a preposition. It melds words into a single, time-defying part of a sentence. Another example from the same poem is: “it’s-all-a-reënactmentwith-a-proper-arc.” This technique forces the reader to stop and assemble parts to create meaning—a neat trick for a poet, an effect borrowed from film, also, and perfectly apt to this subject matter.
Gregerson employs themes of nature, blended with contemporary references and not idealized into pastoral escapism. She also contemplates human evolution, as in “A Knitted Femur,” which begins with a Neanderthal bone and ends with a listserv captcha. The “knitted” bone indicates care for a wounded individual and not abandonment—evidence of humanity. This basic qualification for human—not animal—
identity evolves to the abstracted internet requirement beyond artificial intelligence. The poet explains, “To sign up for the / listserv I was shuttled to another screen / and asked to ‘confirm/ human.’ I checked the box.” The Neanderthals who nurtured a wounded group member show more humanity than the narrator, who simply responds to a yes/no requirement.
Some poems find the best way to phrase experiences almost beyond words, like “Bearded Iris,” which begins:
A sort of snyathetic input: the purple
Smell like grapes when grapes
Still had a smell, and remnants
Of fertility, which we
In an excess of ever-more-ease
Have banished from our tables.
The aroma of grapes is a perfect way to describe iris fragrance, but the poet does not rest on this moment, but instead pursues a critique of corporatized agriculture. She captures its sterility in the same breath that she celebrates beauty. Gregerson is a complicated poet whose ideas and use of language are both worthy of study.