The Commuting Mind of Linda Gregerson (Cont'd from previous page)

By John Woodford

S P E N S E R  A N D   T H E   I R I S H

Another storm Gregerson rises above is whether the Elizabethan poet-politician Edmund Spenser was a hero or villain. "In the canon, Spenser is rightly presented as a great poet," says Gregerson, who wrote on Spenser and Milton in her 1995 study, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge University Press). "But when students today learn that this highly conscious moral thinker was also a fervid advocate for genocide in Ireland, his reputation can seem anomalous."

Scholars or students who think they must take either a pro or anti position toward Spenser are missing what literature is for, Gregerson says. "The challenge to us is not to choose between discrediting or championing him, but to ask how a person in his era and circumstances could embrace a range of aesthetic and philosophical and practical courses we believe to be profoundly at odds. We want to understand historical difference and help our students and readers understand it. The things our era sequesters, or likes to think ought to be sequestered-the world of politics, bureaucracy and military conquest sequestered from the world of science or erotic love-were frankly interdependent in the Renaissance, different aspects of a single theoretical discourse or a single public career."

Some recent trends in anti-orthodox criticism of the roster of literary masterpieces known as "canonical texts" have upset many scholars and book lovers. But Gregerson argues that identifying the social and political embeddedness of literary texts, even when their social and political perspectives cause us consternation, is part of our continuing tribute to the power of literary imagination and literary heritage. Plays and novels and poems are uniquely able to reveal the "stress fractures in the social edifice" of the authors' time and give readers a stronger sense of the past, she says.

"It's not the business of the writer to be a figure we can use for purposes of our own self-congratulation," Gregerson adds. "Nor do writers put forth a model for us to emulate in any straightforward manner. Art puts the questions to us. It doesn't provide us with The Five Rules By Which We Are To Live Our Lives. That's not what literature is good for. It's to challenge us to develop a more humane awareness, not to make us homogeneous."

'O N E  I S  A  R E S T I N G  P L A C E  A N D  R E P R I E V E  F O R  T H E  O T H E R '

While she goes about the task of opening a new way to look at perhaps the most influential era of English and early American literature, Gregerson also keeps her career as a poet at full boil.

This year, she has published her third volume of poetry, Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin), won an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature and is heading for Prague this summer for an international writers institute. Next spring, she'll be the Elliston Poet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati, where her predecessors include Berryman, Spender, Lowell and Frost.

"It's important to me that there be a commute between my scholarly work and my poetry," Gregerson says. "One is a resting place and reprieve for the other. The writing is so different, but the obsessions are shared. Sometimes even the subject matter is shared. For example, the pamphlets of John Eliot on the Algonquians appear in my current volume of poetry."

Another figure from the scholarly side of her life, George Wishart, also emerges in Waterborne. A preacher of the first Scottish Protestant church, Wishart chose in 1546 to be burned at the stake at the age of 33 rather than conform to the Roman Catholic church. He migrated into her poetry, Gregerson says, "because, I suppose, episodes like this lead me to wonder, what makes people think it better to endure the alternative-torture, death or both-than to renounce their beliefs? I spend a lot of time exploring that question."

G r e g e r s o n 's p r o g r e s s i o n :
A C T I NG  B U G B I T E S ,  E D I T I N G  J O B  B E C K O N S

Linda Gregerson grew up in the small town (pop. 2,000) of Cary, Illinois, west of Chicago. It was her mother's home town and not far south of where her father grew up in Wisconsin farm country.

After graduating from Oberlin College in 1971, Gregerson went to Northwestern to study Shakespearean theater with Samuel Schoenbaum. Bitten by the theater bug, she left school with an MA and worked as an actor in Herman Blau's experimental theater company, Kraken.

Blau's method involved deriving scripts from long periods of improvisation, and that process has left its mark on Gregerson's writing. She had never taken a poetry class but started publishing her poetry in literary magazines and put together a portfolio of work while she was still a member of Kraken. She eventually left the company for the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA in 1977.

Now with her second master's degree in hand, she went to Stanford "thinking I would be sensible and write a thesis on modern poetry, but I couldn't stay away from the Renaissance. It's shattering, wonderful and messy. It feels like the center of the world to me intellectually. It's capacious. It can absorb all the new trends in literary criticism and has in fact generated two or three of the most interesting critical methods of our era. And the people in the field are great company."

While finishing her doctoral dissertation, Gregerson moved to Boston with her husband, Steven Mullaney (who also teaches in U-M's Department of English), and became a staff editor in poetry at the Atlantic Monthly, a position she held for six years, reading every single one of the 60,000 or so poems submitted to the publication every year.

She also taught at MIT and in Boston University's graduate creative writing program (she directed U-M's program for three years), and completed and published her first book of poetry, Fire in the Conservatory (Dragon Gate, 1982).