Hi friends,
I really enjoyed writing about poetry on here a few weeks ago and I’m thinking I’d like to (informally) make it a recurring thing. So, one month later, here’s another newsletter about a poem. This time I’m looking at the poet Linda Gregg, who has in recent months become one of my favourites. I discovered Gregg the way we (unfortunately) discover many female artists: by their proximity to male artists. Gregg was married for a time to Jack Gilbert, who some of you will know is my all-time most beloved poet. But she was tremendously accomplished in her own right and I’m a bit ashamed that it took me so long to become aware of this!
One of her standout poems, to me, is We Manage Most When We Manage Small:
It’s the opening poem of Gregg’s collection ‘Too Bright To See,’ and the opening poem of a book is always worth noting. It functions, to some extent, as a framing mechanism—or at least a bellwether—for the book at large. What the reader takes from the first poem is more often than not the paradigm that guides them through the collection. Much of ‘Too Bright To See’ deals with the dissolution of Gregg’s marriage, which makes this particular poem striking for its syntactical attention to ephemerality, brevity. Moreover, it’s the opening poem of Gregg’s very first published collection; in a sense, this poem introduces her to the world. And considered thusly, the syntax holds yet more weight. It signals this remarkable tension between the known and unknown.
The title, We Manage Most When We Manage Small, reads to me as the fragile confidence of a hard-earned lesson. But the surety of this aphoristic title is belied by the—drumroll please—syntax of the piece itself. Over the course of this relatively short poem, we encounter 9 fragments. (For comparison, there are just 6 complete sentences.) Each fragment links back to an earlier, more complete, explication of the poem’s overarching motifs. All that separates each fragment from its genesis is a full stop which could have easily been a more sensible comma.
So what to make of this tendency toward abruptness? In fragmenting the language of these examples, Gregg exemplifies them. Punctuation in poetry is a mutable thing; it can be leveraged for connection or for distinction, depending on the context. Here, I would posit that this use of fragmentation is highly intentional in the way each image simultaneously stands alone and also relates back to a larger feeling or idea. After all, on the meta level, that’s the whole point of the poem: hurrying in our brevity, making safety in the managing of small moments. The calm middle road, perhaps, is the one that allows glimmers of transcendence; we—the reader and the speaker—are sensitive creatures, dealing in small moments.
But given that the larger moments (both in syntax and in idea) get interrupted or fragmented, I’d like to take my line of analysis one step further and argue that the poem is fundamentally self-reflexive. The exact sequence of events that it outlines is, too, what occurs within the poem itself. What things are steadfast? the speaker asks in the first line; yet it then follows that nothing in fact seems to be. As I said before, the first poem of a collection sets a tone or paradigm—and so opening the first poem with a question is a brave and intuitive move. Clearly Gregg is interested in asking questions, whether rhetorical or otherwise, and cataloging possible responses or rebuttals. This is to be a collection marked by duality: confident and uncertain, big and small, steadfast and fleeting.
In general when I think of Gregg’s poetry, I’m always struck by its lack of prescriptiveness: her pursuit of that which is genuine and her willingness to try on a few things to see what sticks, what holds true. I think that’s why I love this particular poem so much. To me, it sums up that tendency beautifully—and, of course, in a characteristically understated way.
No bonus links section today, sorry folks. It’s past my bedtime and I never manage to plan this bit in advance. I will say though that this week I’ve been:
Listening to the new Lorde track (can’t decide if it’s a total carefree jam or if I utterly hate it?? Anyone else?)
Reading Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel. Interesting so far.
Watching doccies in Encounters festival—specifically, my thesis supervisor’s new film, The Colonel’s Stray Dogs, was phenomenal.
That’s all for today! Catch you next time.
Maddy