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Thursday, April 12, 2012

An introduction to Linda Gregg, by Jessica Burton


Linda Gregg Review
By Jessica Burton
            Linda Gregg is the well-known author of many poetry books.  Her ideas are inspired from her surroundings, so much so that she claims that she always dresses in neutral palates in order to avoid having a distraction from the outside world.  Her daily life is said to be filled with always attempting to write.  She sets out goals for herself, such as, write a poem before noon, or else she has to sit down and write up words for each letter of the alphabet over and over again until she is inspired to write.  This type of commitment to her work really shows how she is able to come up with so many great ideas for her poems.
            Common links between her poems are the details within each of them.  She pulls in multiple descriptions from her home and nature in order to convey her messages.  At first the details may seem like many other poems, la ist of what is around the area and nothing too spectacular, but then she pulls in an unexpected element.  In Watching the Last Boat, Gregg is describing a boat crash and the wood splitting apart, and then becoming indiscernible in the evening light.  A mention of a painting and her sadness in seeing it is then written about.  The painting had nothing to do with the boat’s crash, but she pulled it together with her feelings for the crashing boat and her feeling for leaving the painting both being sadness.  The boat and the painting are both conveying the death of something; the boat is no longer and the painting was purposefully the last of Rembrandt’s.  I believe that she is trying to convey feelings with showing them in different ways in hopes that people will understand at least one of them and then be able to understand the other through it.
            Her reasoning for her writing style was that it helps for her to see what her life looks like when she is always trying to describe it.  She had even said, “everything that’s worth remembering is sensational.”  So she writes her life into her poems in order for her to remember it; it’s almost as if each poem is a different story in her life and if they were all put together they would form her autobiography.
            Butler University was very lucky in being able to have such an imaginative writer visit our school.  Gregg’s poems are well recognized within the literature community and her descriptive and truthful pieces could very well be considered works of art through words.  I would recommend her works to any person wanting to view the world through a new looking glass.

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