Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute: Linda Gregerson (2015)

This article is about a single event. For other uses, see the Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute (disambiguation).

The O.B. Hardison Poetry Series, co-sponsored with the Poetry Society of America, presented the Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute reading on December 07, 2015, at 7:30pm in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre. Poet, scholar, and classically trained actress, Linda Gregerson, brought her unique voice to this annual poetry reading in honor of Emily Dickinson. “In poem after poem, Gregerson manages to pair narrative immediacy with intricate orchestration, creating a kind of writing that hustles us along even as it reaches back through complicated echoes of earlier moments in the poem.” —Los Angeles Review of Books.

A conversation was moderated by Alice Quinn, former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America.

At the reception following the reading, Emily Dickinson’s black cake was provided by The Suga Chef.

This event was in association with the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Linda Gregerson

Linda Gregerson.

Linda Gregerson is the author of eight poetry collections, including Prodigal, New and Selected Poems, The Selvage, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize), Magnetic North (finalist for the National Book Award), and Waterborne (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award). In 2015, Gregerson was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Gregerson has read for the O.B. Hardison Poetry series previously, on January 13, 2003

Reviews and excerpts

From Waterborne

3

and look: the river lifts to its lover the sun

in eddying

layers of mist as though

we hadn’t irreparably fouled the planet

after all.

My neighbor’s favorite spot for bass is just

below the sign that makes his fishing

rod illegal,

you might almost say the sign is half

the point. The vapors draft their languorous

excurses on

a liquid page. Better than the moment is

the one it has in mind.