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Poetry is part of our search for emotional clarity, especially during times of intense sorrow or joy, says internationally acclaimed poet and scholar Linda Gregerson.
The aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for example, resulted in a huge resurgence of public interest in poetry. “When we’re profoundly shaken as human beings, when life-as-usual brutally slips from our grasp, poetry gives us something to hang on to,” she says.
Gregerson plans to read her latest poems as part of the 2010 Distinguished University Professorship Lecture Series. As the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English, her presentation begins at 4 p.m. Feb. 2 in the Rackham Amphitheatre. The event is free and open to the public.
“This is a flourishing period for poetry, certainly in America,” she says. “I think we’re hungry for it because it addresses an elemental human need — an instinct for rendering our thoughts and feelings in ways that include the musical aspects of language. I think slowing down long enough to read a poem, to listen to a poem, to write a poem is an extremely important antidote to the frenzy that characterizes our daily lives.”
Distinguished University Professorships, established in 1947, recognize full or associate professors for exceptional scholarly and/or creative achievement, national and international reputation, and superior teaching skills. Each professorship bears a name determined by the appointive professor in consultation with her or his dean. Caroline Walker Bynum, for whom Gregerson’s new professorship is named, is a distinguished historian of medieval religion and a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.
“Caroline Bynum’s work as an historian provides a luminous example for poets too,” Gregerson says. “Her eloquence is fully matched by her compassion.”
Gregerson started writing poetry only after she had graduated from college; her earlier work had been in the theater, and she readily grants its influence on her poems.
“Many of my poems include multiple voices,” she says. “I try to make them porous somehow, liable-to-impingement. It’s possible that’s an essentially dramatic impulse. More profoundly, I suppose I’ve always taken that greatest of all episodes in world theater — I refer of course to the play within a play in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ — as a how-to manual for living. We learn to be human by pretending to be human. We make the gesture, then try to fill it. Every child enters the world this way.”
Gregerson, who teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature, joined the U-M faculty in 1987. From 1997-2000, she directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing. She has received awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Humanities Center, the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Prize Foundation, the International Spenser Society, the Modern Poetry Association and the Institute for Advanced Study. “Waterbourne” won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize; “Magnetic North” was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry as well as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Ploughshares, Yale Review and other publications. She also is the author of two volumes of literary criticism: “Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry” (2001) and “The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic” (1995). Her essays on lyric poetry and Renaissance literature appear in many journals and anthologies, such as The Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, Criticism and ELH (English Literary History).
