By Emily Langer
The Washington Post
Linda Gregg, an award-winning poet whose muse followed her in her wanderings from the wilds of California to the rugged hills of Greece, from the Texas desert to a New York homeless shelter, in love and in the absence of it, died March 20 at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 76.
The cause was cancer, said the poet Timothy Liu, a friend of decades.
Linda Alouise Gregg was born in Suffern, N.Y. on Sept. 9, 1942, one of four girls. Their father was an architect and arts educator, and their mother was a teacher, Liu said. When Gregg was young, her parents moved the family west to start a cooperative school in Marin.
The family lived in a tent in Samuel P. Taylor State Park for almost a year while her father worked at the San Rafael planning department, according a 1993 profile in the Marin Independent Journal. Later her father bought land in Forest Knolls and she was raised there.
The cooperative school did not happen but the Greggs founded the Forest Farms summer camps in the San Geronimo Valley.
“I am made of the landscape in northern California where I grew up,” she wrote in an essay, recalling a mountain where she and her twin communed with “the live oak trees, the stillness, the tall grass, the dry smell of the hot summer air where the red-tailed hawks turned slowly up high, where the two of us alone at ten did the spring roundup of my father’s twenty-six winter-shaggy horses.”
Gregg was nearly 40 years old when her first book of poetry, “Too Bright to See,” was published in 1981. She followed it with half a dozen more volumes, attracting praise from poets as distinguished as the late W.S. Merwin, who lauded her poems as “original in the way that really matters.”
“They speak clearly of their source,” Merwin observed in comments published by the Poetry Foundation. “They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance.”
Yet as late as a decade ago, Gregg had yet to receive the attention that some readers considered her due. In 2009, the organization Poets & Writers awarded her the Jackson Poetry Prize, then worth $50,000, honoring “an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition.”
“I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written,” she had observed in an essay published three years earlier by the Academy of American Poets. “What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech.”
She said that, when reading a poem, the emphasis should be on “the insides of the poem rather than with its surface, with the content rather than with the packaging. Too often in workshops and classrooms there is a concentration on the poem’s garments instead of its life’s blood.”
Gregg graduated in 1967 from what is now San Francisco State University, where she also received a master’s degree in English in 1972. Her professors there included Gilbert; they were a couple from 1962 to 1970 and remained friends until his death in 2012. Gregg’s subsequent marriage to John Brentlinger ended in divorce, and her survivors include her three sisters.
In later decades of her life, Gregg found financial security by living frugally on teaching salaries, Liu said. She taught at prestigious institutions including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton University and Columbia University and received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and several Pushcart Prizes.
Her collections of poetry included “Eight Poems” (1982), “Alma” (1985), “Sacraments of Desire” (1991), “Chosen by the Lion” (1994), “Things and Flesh” (1999), “In the Middle Distance” (2006) and “All of It Singing” (2008).
“Certainly one can make good poems without feeling much or discovering anything new,” she wrote. “You can produce fine poems without believing anything, but it corrodes the spirit and eventually rots the seed-corn of the heart. Writing becomes manufacturing instead of giving birth.”
The Marin Independent Journal contributed to this report.
