by Afton Montgomery | Contributing Writer
A darkness
speaking from inside itself:
what is this murder, who is defiled?
What is ordained, what is the story?1
INTERVIEWER
Did you and Linda ever collaborate?
GILBERT
We were intertwined. We read each other’s poetry, appreciated each other’s poetry, discarded each other’s poetry.2
The premise is that everything is a lie. Because the sources are poems, and poets are liars even when they are telling the truth. (These poets make no claim to be telling the truth.)3
I made the timeline as if time might be enough to explain a thing. As if a line might be.
Jack was first—to birth and to books. He won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1962 and published Views of Jeopardy, but that one wasn’t for Linda. It was before Linda, and it was for a different poet called Laura (but with many sidelong written glances at an Italian lover, Gianna). Of both women, I’ve had to decide that I don’t care, else this inquiry would grow entirely too large. Already, I had to fit the question—what is the story?—in a black milk crate in the trunk of the Subaru for the drive from Inland Northwest wet and stubbled wheats to the dry backside of the Rockies.
JACKViews of Jeopardy (1962)
Married,or something like it, to Linda (1963-1971)
Marriedto Michiko and no longer to Linda (1971-1982)
LINDAToo Bright to See (1981)
JACKMonolithos (1982)
Deathof Michiko, age thirty-six (1982)
JACKKochan, with four poems from Michiko Nogami (1984)
LINDAAlma (1985)
LINDAThe Sacraments of Desire (1991)
JACKThe Great Fires (1994)
J + LLove: a diptych (1994)
LINDAChosen by the Lion (1995)
LINDAThings and Flesh (1999)
JACKRefusing Heaven (2005)
LINDAIn the Middle Distance (2006)
JACKTough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006)
JACKTransgressions (2006)
LINDAAll of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (2008)
JACKThe Dance Most of All (2010)
JACKCollected Poems (2012)
The books are out of order in the crate, arranged by size instead of age, and I suppose that’s meaningful too or at least equally meaningless. Anne Carson, shoved in the side—a slim blue volume on the space between Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy—is getting bent at her corners.
I can’t care about Laura Ulewicz and Gianna Gelmetti. I can’t care about Jack’s other women either, not even Michiko Nogami (but I can’t finish the sentence without telling you I’m lying—of course I’m lying; I have to find room for Michiko in the question).
(I added Michiko to the timeline after I made it.)
Michiko Nogami was a sculptor who died in the year of Jack’s Monolithos: cancer and only thirty-six. I cleared out a drawer of the question for her, and in the drawer, I put the black hairs that Jack hunted down after the funeral “from the drain / from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator.” In the drawer, I put the last hair he found, a year on, tangled round the roots of her avocado plant in the dirt.4
I had to wade through the two years after Michiko’s death before I could put in the drawer the little purple chapbook Kochan, which was published in a run of 300 in 1984 with four poems that Michiko wrote amongst Jack’s.
Michiko fits in the question—her drawer in the chest—but is not of the question. This is because when I search for images of Michiko online, the results are a grid:
poem by Jack / poem by Jack / photo of Jack / poem by Jack / photo of Linda / photo of Jack speaking with his hands // cover of Kochan / photo of young Jack + Linda / photo Jack / photo Jack / photo Linda / photo Jack / photo Jack
I don’t make the rules.
“[Linda] was the most valuable person in my life. She’s the most important person in the world to me.”5
I don’t mean to say that Jack made the rules either, by quoting him. It’s just that a love lost while living remains adequate soil for life, if tended. A love lost to death suffers tilling and then the inevitable dryness that declines into nutrient loss and runoff. Michiko remained on the page, but Linda sat next to him on the planes to and from Greece, long after they stopped living or loving there. The loss of Linda’s love was tied as Jack’s greatest regret with the death of Michiko, although only one could even remotely be said to be any fault of his.6
I wonder of Michiko what it was like to die under the moon of Linda. To blink through Monolithos’ 1982 dedication under cancer-heavy eyes.
TO LINDA GREGG
WITH ADMIRATION AND LOVE
Still, I love the many marriage moons.
The positively menstrual of Linda and Jack, singing in the round to their lovers and lovers and lovers and lovers. I pinch my attachment to their dance between the digits of book dedications. Linda’s Too Bright to See is:
FOR JACK GILBERT
IT WAS LIKE BEING ALIVE TWICE
Her New and Selected echoes just the same.
Jack called in circles all on his own: one book is for Laura, one for Linda, one for Michiko. One for Linda and Michiko, one for Linda, one for layering, one for coming undone. The first half of Monolithos is an echo of Views of Jeopardy (quite literally, the same poems, although ordered differently).
Linda’s alto entered—an improvised cue!—to complicate the melody and rhythm, connoting not lesser importance, but merely youth. Her lilting carried on after his grumble waned off into dementia and then the grave. A fugue into a haunting solo. Moon after moon after moon.
Cresting the 90s, Linda loved “considering the moon.”
I love taking her words, her titles, to fit my sentences. “Considering the Moon” is not about the moon—
I love the places on your body where
the bright patina is worn down to the metal
by the touching and kissing. Toe and knee,
nose or cheek or nipple . . .7
Okay, so it is about the moon. Her moons. Jack, and later her husband John Brentlinger and Li-Young Lee and whoever else (but still Jack, some way, even if not the way he wanted). And what is a moon but a filament of light, tangled and unspooling and then made right again? Both the unspooling and the righting hold the question in their gaze. The question admires both of their light equally.
What I mean is: every love is and isn’t a piece of the answer, a part of the story. The wolf moon and the worm moon both are the same rock in space. Too, the strawberry moon of summer, coming. What is the story is a question of the air between a poet and a bit of light.
Two years after Michiko died, Jack published Kochan for her, hand sewn in Mulberry rice paper. Its final page is etched with a poem from the Man’yĹŤshĹ«, the oldest anthology of Classical Japanese poetry.
If I had known the size of this longing
I would have watched you every day
like looking in a clear mirror8
An affirmation that Jack learned to study light.
As a poet, Jack stood apart from the contemporaneous, glowing as “a lyrical ghost . . . practicing a poetics of purity in an ever-more cacophonous world . . .”9
“His poetry is about the reciprocal relationships between experience and language . . . these relationships are parallel.10 I have to slow down.
The poet looks to the moon; the moon shines back.
The poem looks to truth; truth bats its lashes.
Diptychs, both, with something like love in the middle.
What is the story? The question can be answered only when I turn to the semicolon, to what’s alchemized between two beings, to what happens when moonlight meets a gaze in the middle.
I guess the question, then, is about touch. What lives in the luminous interstitial?
I will sidestep, a roundabout route to the root of the light. Seventeenth century painter Annibale Carracci had some of his own brilliance; he coined a start-and-stop brush style that blended stillness into movement, especially in the natural world. But it wasn’t until Raphael and Michelangelo reached out to him through the muscular angelic of antiquity that Carracci brought light to bodies in an interesting—and revolutionary (for it was the meeting of the Classical with fluidity that created the Baroque)—way.11
Like Jack and more so like Linda, Carracci fell into a gentle obscurity. Caravaggio easily took fame, to which the latecomer’s fighting spirit was perhaps better suited, a decade later in his place. Meanwhile (time is useless to the question—the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the same), Jack got nominated for a Pulitzer, won the Guggenheim, and took the $5000 to run away from all the attention and land, with Linda, on a quiet island in Greece.12
Let me try again with time.
JACK“Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed.13 (1962)
JACKAlways I have been afraid
of the return to love
with perspective.14
LINDAage nineteen, meets Jack when he is her professor (1963)
JACKneeds to leave fame; takes Linda to the sea (1966)
LINDAfalls out of love. Of losing the light on the islands:
Sometimes a person just stops.
Take love for example.15 (1994)
Divorceor something like it (1971)
In San Francisco,Jack meets Michiko; marries (1971)
LINDAThe specter holds up her arms to show
that her hands are eaten off.16 (1981)
JACK“Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed.17 (1982)
JACKMe cleaning squid. Linda getting up from a chair.18 (1982)
DeathMichiko’s, at age thirty-six (1982)
I can only make it so far. When the light comes through the pages of Linda’s poems, I can see the ribbing inside the paper. There are bones that hold these things together.
The poems have bodies of their own. So the bodies are the story!—the place where language and experience meet, the answer and the question.
In a different book from my milk crate of books is Jack’s burdened, near-Sisyphus body—
He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.19
Can I cut the poem?
No.
Inside the no is the yes. Isn’t it?20
Perhaps. Perhaps I just cut the twine around the box. Let it spill to the floor.
Yes.
Linda loved Jack and Jack loved Linda. Jack cheated on Linda and Linda cheated on Jack. They walked each day for four or more of their eight years together in Greece from Monolithos to ThĂra, four or more miles one way and the same the way back. Nothing happened in any particular order. They were married but had no wedding; they played at being married; they were never married; the word marriage is more a word for somethingthan it is a word that stands alone. Divorce too. Poems are cradles and marriage and divorce are babies. Neither ever had any babies.
It is good to let go, says Linda.21 I am not looking for love, says Jack.22
Jack’s Orpheus is Jack in every poem and Linda’s Eurydice is Eurydice. If we can count on anything. Orpheus and Eurydice are in every book. If I pick facts from memory instead of pages.
Everything is a diptych if you try hard enough. Enough isn’t very much at all.
After a visit to Rome, Carracci started incorporating the bulbous god-bodies of men into his work. In frescoes depicting a series of scenes, these muscled male bodies appear leaning against columns to divide the stories, like the edges of boxes in a comic strip. Baroque painter Pietro Aquila reproduced Carracci’s series in engravings—the original artist’s light work becoming all the more important in black and white.23
Art belongs in the question. Or the question belongs to art.
Within the chest of drawers that is the question, I clear space to play with art. Does art belong to the body? Does the body belong to art? In one drawer, I set a tube of Windsor & Newton watercolor, cobalt blue. I set a strand of my own hair. I set one collection of poems by Linda and one by Jack. I lift them and make them talk to each other, little puppets or dolls in the little world of What is the story? I close the drawer and let them play on their own.
The particular Aquila engraving that found me did so in the Wellcome Collection in London, where I went chasing an inquiry about the medical in art after my dad’s death. The left-most scene shows Orpheus, holding a lyre and looking over his shoulder, and half of Eurydice’s body as the dark of the underworld calls her back out of the frame. Naked men, lions, and cherubs divide this heartbreak from the next scene to the right, in which Diana—Roman goddess of the moon—holds the head of Endymion as he sleeps.24
This is all memory’s answer to the piece of the question that goes: What exists between lost love and the moon?
Nakedness.
Classicism. Mythology. My thinking splits.
- The moon is not the Moon. Endymion was cursed by Jupiter to sleep forever and be loved by Selene, not Diana.25 Selene is the moon, and Diana is the moon’s governing force (much like Helios is the sun and Diana’s twin brother Apollo is god of the sun). Somewhere along the road from story to art, the two women were equated; likely, Carracci, new to the ancient myths of Rome, took liberties he ought not, equating them. He ended with a painting he didn’t even like, Diana positioned awkwardly so that it looked more like she was delousing Endymion than tenderly caressing his sleeping head.
- (Nakedness. Classicism. Mythology—)
Linda and Jack wrote themselves into myth, as if they both, through poems, intended to find a loophole out of overcrowded twentieth century life. Linda was a “woman who wants to live in the world, but who at the same time needs a spirituality which demands purity to such a degree that she is often driven out of the human.”26 Jack was a “lyrical ghost” (I’ve said this before—he haunts me, I can’t help it) “from a literary history that never came to be.”27 Like it did to Carracci, the Classical called to Jack, taking him away from New York’s uglinesses and to the backside of a Greek island with no people, cars, plumbing, or lights.28
Jack left the U.S. because he felt unseen by the modern and by fame.
The question will pardon a smaller question: whether Jack was actually misunderstood in the literary scene or whether he merely felt he was (further: whether this matters). Jack’s geographical move was intended to be equally a move through time.
I can say with no certainty in the objective sense and total certainty in the subjective one that Jack’s “Orpheus in Greenwich Village,” on his poor fit in the scene, is his most quoted poem. Something must, after all, explain to those living in the present why someone we love begs off to go live in the past. Or: in loving, we demand to be allowed such brash statements. We demand an explanation for reclusiveness. Jack gives it.
What if Orpheus,
confident in the hard-
found mastery,
should go down into Hell?
Out of the clean light down?
And then, surrounded
by the closing beasts
and readying his lyre,
should notice, suddenly,
they had no ears?29
Orpheus is Jack is a man tormented by the fear that his most desperate acts of self-preservation will be in vain. (I don’t know who Jack is or was. A ghost, certainly, now.) (The premise is that everything is a lie.) The stakes of the poem are Jack’s artmaking and whatever he may love.
The odds of success are none.
Jack could choose to die or hide.
Add reclusiveness to the question.
Secrecy sits smoking a cigarette in a shadowed corner of the question. Secrecy may be a decoy, though, because secrecy and the writing of a life are not the same thing, and secrecy’s twisting smoke is entirely too sexy for the scene. A streetlight and not a moon.
At a reading in Marin County in 1976, Jack held Linda’s hand when one of the two of them wasn’t reading, and there was nothing secret about it, only the quiet of habit and love and Michiko off to the side somewhere with a wedding ring on.30
Reclusiveness is not secrecy. Reclusiveness lived in the moment that Jack interrupted Linda’s reading of her poem to ask of her a question—a personal question, I suppose, which the foamy microphones did not catch and transmit to the audience or to the memory of a grainy video that found me decades on. The trouble with words is represented here perfectly—
A recluse is an individual who separates themself from others.
Reclusiveness is a tendency to separate from society.
Of the latter, singleness is not part of the definition. The poets were a closed loop.
After Jack died, Linda missed “the dialogue we had with each other; the not being alone part.”31
I think she means both on and off the page, although he’s said he wasn’t much for chatter.32 I wonder if any two have ever been so engaged in conversation for so long. Their reference to each other or some version of each other exists on nearly fifty years of the printed page.
The question is hungry for the ambiguity of space between. Betwixt-ness is the defining of the question. I wonder if I ought to ask What is their story instead of What is the story? But to do so would take me out of the question, a decision that would be entirely unfair to truth (whatever “truth” means).
Return to: Jack could choose to die or hide.
Return to: “Michiko dying, I regret terribly, and losing Linda’s love, I regret equally.”33
Return to: “Perspective,” he would mutter, going to bed—a line published in three of Jack’s six books.
Everything is a diptych if you try hard enough. I look up into the moon of the lovers.
I imagine the three books that mutter perspective facing into the mirror of the three books that do not answer the call.
No, that can’t be right. The image conjures too much aloneness.
Inside the no is the yes. Isn’t it?34
Yes then. But not yes only.
The real diptych, the one in a paper body, arrives at my library. A notice arrives in my university email telling me so.
Love, it’s called, and it was hand sewn into Phthalo blue filare from Simpson Paper Company in 1994. The blue encasing is soft and shows the threads that line up to hold its shape. Linda’s name comes first on the cover, divided from Jack’s with a backslash, as if the names are lines in a poem.35
I have every book by Linda and every book by Jack piled to the sides of me, freed from the confines of their milk crate, and I have interviews and old videos and essays and reviews.
The question does not necessarily grow with all of that added paper. The question in its entirety can fit in this chapbook, Love, number 47 of 180 ever made, right along the Phthalo thread that knots at its center: dividing the only two poems printed there.
Linda’s “Alone with the Goddess,” from May 2, 1994, sits on the left.
Jack’s “Winning, Falling and Flying,” from November 6, the same year, faces it from the right.
I was born between the two.
“All I’ve done is fail at love, except for the part where I didn’t fail.”36
That’s what Linda said from a stage, just a few years before she died (and a few years after Jack did). She had to come out of her own learned isolation to do so.
Failing:
I’m trying so hard to love them well.
Time, in sentences:
Jack and Linda met and fell in love.
They moved to Greece and also spent time living in Denmark.
After eight years, the so-called marriage fell apart. They returned to the
U.S. separately.
Jack married Michiko, who, after eleven years, died.
Jack and Linda remained Jack-and-Linda for the entirety of their lives.
Linda cared for Jack for his last decade as he lost himself to dementia.
In 2012, Jack died.
In 2019, Linda went to meet him. They always wanted to end up in the
Greece they used to know.
I don’t know where I belong in the question. It’s bad research to claim that I do belong here and worse research to imply that I don’t.
It was on Santorini, moving along the five miles of road between a plaster house we rented and ThĂra that the box holding my own relationship saw its bottom fall out. The bottom kept on falling out for years.
Jack and Linda walked from their empty side of the same island and back each day. In ThĂra, they gathered fruits and bread from the market. On the way back, Jack says he yelled and Linda cried; I rail and she suffers and the moon / does not rise.37
Linda says, If I cried, perhaps it was in relief and joy.38
I’m trying to find Selene—to smuggle her back into the frame in Diana’s place. This shouldn’t be so hard for poets so entranced with light. But the poems struggle against the shifting luminescence of the moon. Here is Linda in a Jack poem thinking it will be too dark to do the dishes if they don’t eat soon. Here is Jack, fallen off the edge of a Linda poem because she faces the sparkling Aegean, away from him, and she screams.
A question can only stay a question for so long.
The diptych called Love is signed by both poets and by the painter whose piece, “Outlook,” has been hand-cut into a tiny rectangle and glued into the front page. I wait for an email back from the artist, Janice La Motta, who’s outlived both poets, and meanwhile imagine her answers to my questions about her painting.
I imagine the landscape is the view from the farmhouse on the edge of Santorini where Linda and Jack lived. The sky was cloudy, day eloping with night while no one noticed. Both cried.
Logic of Engraving:
If I can take away Diana, take away governance—
(Then) If I can find Selene and give her Endymion to hold—
(Then) If I can ask the naked and statued man between the two frames to step
away—
(Then) If I can give Orpheus and Eurydice the light of the moon in love—
Trouble:
It is not the point. The statue is
camouflage for the emptiness left behind.39
Failing:
To give the couple the moon, I have to remove Classicism. I have to remove
mythos. Linda knows I can’t give her love. (To use the word love as if it is not
her estate is to disregard what I know to be true.) (Linda and Jack would love
each other for fifty years.)
Also true: Linda did not dally in expectancy.
Poet Tess Gallagher writes that expectation functions negatively in Linda’s poems because it prolongs desire for a lost lover. It is “also then the warp in the mirror, causing hurt because it leaps ahead of what is.”40 I hold the diptych half open and watch love wend and ripple. The blue paper is fabric-soft; in La Motta’s painting, it’s impossible to tell the time of day coming off the grey sea.
(Linda has said, as Eurydice:
I did not cry as much in the darkness
as I will when we part in the dimness
near the opening which is the way in for you
and was the way out for me.)41
Freedom:
Eurydice’s lost “way out,” pairs with Linda’s found lovelessness in the dark (or
lost love if I insist on a parallelism that might frustrate me up from my seat in
its passivity).
Later, Linda wrote to the moon—
I am yours as a ghost is mostly its rind,
. . . Your specter glowing in the dark . . . Let me sleep
in the curve of your face. Let me play quietly there.42
Two hollow figments of light, intertwined, then. With desire, with seduction,
after following in Selene’s footsteps up the sky, she needs
to see if the moon is a mouth.
To see if I am what it wants.43
More somberly:
It is not love we are after.
No love. Not singing.44
I have not written what the love poems said to each other, printed in tandem in 1994 amidst blue. I won’t, not really. But Linda’s was called “Alone with the Goddess,” and in it she tries to barter with the sea to save her love. (The premise is that everything is a lie.) I keep wondering if she fought with the wrong goddess. I think maybe she meant to beg Selene instead of the sea.
Linda published this poem again, every word and line break the same, in her 1999 Things and Flesh. Jack reprinted his poem, “Winning, Falling and Flying,” in 2005’s Refusing Heaven. He changed its name. He changed its length. He changed its question—
In Love, of love and Linda:Dear God, what a failure.45
Years on, of the same:How can they say
the marriage failed?46
Linda knew poems are best when found and not written.47 She knew long before Jack did.
LINDA“All my poems I wrote in one move; Jack would think a poem
for a whole week and then sit down and write it.”48
JACK“The most important day in my career . . . was when Linda said
Did you ever think of listening to your poems? And my poetry
changed.”49
Jack was first—to birth and to books. Linda’s alto entered to complicate the melody and rhythm. Their poems tuned to harmonies, their moon monthly menstruating its whole self into the sea for the lengths of their two whole lives.
What is the story? The question is a poet looking into the sky, an essayist into the orb of a poem or a hundred poems. The answers, infinite, are somewhere at the center of a diptych of time.
—
1 Gregg, Linda. “Is It Pain If There Is No One There to See It.” Chosen by the Lion. Graywolf Press, 1994.
2 Fay, Sarah, and Jack Gilbert. “Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91.” The Paris Review, no. 175, 2005.
3 Gilbert, Jack. “Poetry Is a Kind of Lying.” Views of Jeopardy. Yale University Press, 1962.
4 Gilbert, Jack. “Married.” The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992, A.A. Knopf, 2013.
5 Fay, Sarah, and Jack Gilbert. “Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91.” The Paris Review, no. 175, 2005.
6 Ibid.
7 Gregg, Linda. “Considering the Moon.” The Sacraments of Desire, Graywolf Press, 1991.
8 Gilbert, Jack and Michiko Nogami. “4221.” Kochan, Tamarack, 1984.
9 O’Rourke, Meghan. “The Recluse: Rescuing the Poet Jack Gilbert from Oblivion.” Slate, 9 May 2005.
10 Moore, Janet C. “Jack Gilbert: noh getting overview.” Hollins Critic, vol. 35, no. 1, Feb. 1998.
11 Christiansen, Keith. “Annibale Carracci (1560–1609).” MetMuseum.org, Oct 2003.
12 Astley, Neil. “Jack Gilbert Obituary.” The Guardian, 20 Nov 2012.
13 Gilbert, Jack. “Perspective He Would Mutter Going to Bed.” Views of Jeopardy. Yale University Press, 1962.
14 Gilbert, Jack. “And She Waiting.” Views of Jeopardy. Yale University Press, 1962.
15 Gregg, Linda. “The Woman Still Waiting.” Chosen by the Lion. Graywolf Press, 1994.
16 Gregg, Linda. “There She Is” Too Bright to See, Graywolf Press, 1981.
17 Gilbert, Jack. “Perspective He Would Mutter Going to Bed.” Monolithos. A.A. Knopf, 1982.
18 Gilbert, Jack. “Not Part of Literature.” Monolithos. A.A. Knopf, 1982.
19 Gilbert, Jack. “Michiko Dead.” The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992, A.A. Knopf, 2013.
20 Gregg, Linda. “The Girl I Call Alma” Too Bright to See, Graywolf Press, 1981.
21 Gregg, Linda. “Maybe Leave-Taking.” Chosen by the Lion. Graywolf Press, 1994.
22 Gilbert, Jack. “A Bird Sings to Establish Frontiers.” Monolithos. A.A. Knopf, 1982.
23 “Pietro Aquila.” Collections Online | British Museum.
24 “Orpheus and Eurydice; Endymion and Diana (Artemis); the Rape of Europa by Jupiter (Zeus). Etching by P. Aquila after Annibale Carracci.” Wellcome Collection.
25 “Endymion.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Nov. 2007.
26 Gallagher, Tess. “Like a Strange Guest of the Earth: The Poems of Linda Gregg.” A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1989.
27 O’Rourke, Meghan. “The Recluse: Rescuing the Poet Jack Gilbert from Oblivion.” Slate, 9 May 2005.
28 Gilbert, Jack. “Not Part of Literature.” Monolithos. A.A. Knopf, 1982.
29 Gilbert, Jack. “Orpheus in Greenwich Village.” Views of Jeopardy. Yale University Press, 1962.
30 “Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg – Part 2.” Reading at Indian Valley College, Novato, CA, March 24, 1976, Bay Area Writers.
31 Gregg, Linda. “Craft of the Invisible.” Palm Beach Poetry Festival, 19 January 2015, Delray Beach, FL.
32 Fay, Sarah, and Jack Gilbert. “Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91.” The Paris Review, no. 175, 2005.
33 Ibid.
34 Gregg, Linda. “The Girl I Call Alma” Too Bright to See, Graywolf Press, 1981.
35 Gregg, Linda, and Jack Gilbert. Love: a diptych. The Captain’s Bookshelf, 1994.
36 Gregg, Linda. “Craft of the Invisible.” Palm Beach Poetry Festival, 19 Jan 2015, Delray Beach, FL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTCLqu_V1y8.
37 Gilbert, Jack. “Walking Home Across the Island.” Monolithos. A.A. Knopf, 1982.
38 Gregg, Linda. “Maybe Leave-Taking.” Chosen by the Lion. Graywolf Press, 1994.
39 Gregg, Linda. “The Bounty After the Bounty.” Chosen by the Lion. Graywolf Press, 1994.
40 Gallagher, Tess. “Like a Strange Guest of the Earth: The Poems of Linda Gregg.” A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1989.
41 Gregg, Linda. “Eurydice” Too Bright to See, Graywolf Press, 1981.
42 Gregg, Linda. “Driving with the Moon.” Chosen by the Lion. Graywolf Press, 1994.
43 Gregg, Linda. “Driving with the Moon.” The Sacraments of Desire. Graywolf Press, 1991.
44 Gregg, Linda. “Not Singing” Too Bright to See, Graywolf Press, 1981.
45 Gregg, Linda, and Jack Gilbert. Love: a diptych. The Captain’s Bookshelf, 1994.
46 Gilbert, Jack. “Failing and Falling.” Refusing Heaven: Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
47 Gregg, Linda. “The Art of Finding.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 24 Oct. 2006, poets.org/text/art-finding.
48 Gregg, Linda. “Craft of the Invisible.” Palm Beach Poetry Festival, 19 Jan 2015, Delray Beach, FL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTCLqu_V1y8.
49 Fay, Sarah, and Jack Gilbert. “Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91.” The Paris Review, no. 175, 2005.
—
Afton Montgomery is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Idaho, where she is the editor in chief of Fugue Journal. She was selected by Vi Khi Nao as the prose winner of the 2021 Mountain West Writers’ Contest at Western Humanities Review. Afton was the recipient of a Centrum Fellowship in 2022 and has recent or forthcoming work in New South, Pleiades, and Fence. She was formerly the frontlist buyer at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver. She calls Colorado home.