Alina Pleskova on Linda Gregg's "Whole and Without Blessing"
An Ordinary Plots Guest Post
Throughout this year, I will be featuring essays by poets I love and admire in response to poems of their choosing. They will appear at random, whenever such poets are moved. I’m honored to include the second installment this week, by the poet Alina Pleskova, writing about Linda Gregg’s poem “Whole and Without Blessing.”
Whole and Without Blessing
What is beautiful alters, has undertow.
Otherwise I have no tactics to begin.
Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes
out of this fever and see the meaning
of my life clearly. A thing like a hill.
I proclaim myself whole and without blessing,
or need to be blessed. A fish of my own
spirit. I belong to no one. I do not move.
Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet
and the indifferent sun warms me.
I was bred for slaughter like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.
from Too Bright to See (Graywolf Press, 1982)
I first encountered Linda Gregg’s poetry on early-2000’s Livejournal, when blogs were having a moment. I didn’t think of myself as a poet then, but I read poetry voraciously &, at first, almost indiscriminately. On daily scrolls through Livejournal’s poetry “communities”, where strangers shared favorite poems spanning nearly every imaginable era & movement, I began mapping my affinities.
I was especially drawn to poems with candid & unlofty speakers—distinctly human voices reporting back from the world, which was a version of the world I lived in, to tell me what they knew (or thought they knew), experienced, felt, & witnessed. And so it was that Gregg’s poems drew me immediately.
Gregg, who died in 2019, had a way of seeing that was both sweeping & direct, like a searchlight with an unpredictable stopping pattern. Her poems are plainspoken & don’t look like much in the way of formal inventiveness, but their clarity can’t be mistaken for simplicity. There’s an acute attention to one’s interiority, but also connectivity to others & one’s surroundings. Countercurrents of intimacy & separateness. A magnitude without floridness. Acuity that doesn’t impart platitudes.
“[D]espite the respect with which her work is regarded, it has not received the critical attention that it deserves,” Reginald Sheperd wrote of Gregg. “This may be due to its indifference toward poetic fashion, its scorning of easy confessionalism or equally easy irony...”
Many of these qualities, which have to do with precision & compression, but also ineffability, make Gregg’s work difficult to discuss on a craft level. As Jack Gilbert, her former teacher & a great love of her life, put in an interview, Gregg had a “strange ability to think as the poem thinks— unmediated a lot of the time.”
As far as I can tell, taking her poems apart in that way won’t reveal much about their magic, anyway. I’m not too interested in examining the how, because I can only read Gregg’s poems as extensions of her particular modes of thought & feeling, which are what she used to make them. Which brings me to what her poems told me, & what I want to talk about with you.
Descriptors like necessary & life-changing are hackneyed & as subjective as it gets, but— & forgive me if this sounds precious— sometimes a poet’s work appears at the most opportune time that one can receive it. And in this way, a poet becomes part of one’s becoming.
I entered my twenties with an outsized interest in prioritizing sexual discovery, & newfound affirmation—thanks to riot grrrl, Eve Babitz, & other pitstops along that well-worn route of intemperate & wayward girls— that it was totally fine to go full throttle with it. My profligacy & its resultant explorations were well-suited to diaristic blog posts, but as my writing shifted towards poetry, I also felt a shift in my self-understanding.
The novelty & thrill of figuring out (& often, but not always, getting) what I wanted, of saying yes to everything, became interspersed with damages that I simply couldn’t prevent or foresee—or in less severe instances, deep boredom or disappointment. Sometimes I felt empowered & luminous. Other times, foolish & adrift. Not much of this was reflected in the “speaker” of my poems— a Samantha Jones-type caricature, minus the money but with seemingly unlimited resilience & agency.
I didn’t want to dilute or erase all the mishaps & traumas, nor emerge on the other side to say I’d learned moral lessons or strove to be another way because of what else I experienced. I was trying to figure out where I was, & how to write from there. Poets like Anne Sexton & Sylvia Plath were a default starting point for (now a tediously loaded descriptor) confessional poetry, but I couldn’t quite map my post-third wave unease onto their conditions. I read other poems, in which body parts were likened to some type of flower or fruit, & women’s sexuality was achingly elevated or otherwise still a site of repression. I didn’t yet know the poets who would become my teachers & friends. But fortuitously, there was Gregg, who knew what I was just starting to perceive, & led me right to it.
Many of Gregg’s poems track desire’s outcomes— not the initial hot bloodrushes, but when or after one gets what one ostensibly wants, or some version of it. What’s there? Pleasure with all its attendant complications.
Take “Kept Burning And Distant”, in which a lover is described this way: “[L]ike rain you are tender, / with the rain’s inept tenderness. / A passion so general I could be anywhere.”
And here’s how it ends: “…and the strong thing is not the sex / but waking up alone under trees after.”
Is it strange to say that it thrilled me to see sex written about in this way? States that seem antithetical to each other intersect here. Fulfillment & lack. Unindividuated gestures of intimacy. How the sex sometimes isn’t the notable part of the sex. How loneliness is sometimes & suddenly divine.
Gregg’s utterances seem, despite what the speaker of these poems well knows, unconcerned with circumspection. In another poem, “The Precision”, she writes of lust: “There is directness and equipoise in the fervor, / just as the greatest turmoil has precision. / Like the discretion a tornado has when it tears / down building after building, house by house. / It is enough, Kafka said, that the arrow fit / exactly into the wound that it makes.”
How crude it can be. How unsettling. How painful. Sometimes (& perhaps perplexingly) by choice. Or worse, not.
The "there" I wanted to write from is now the place from which I’m writing into what I once, consciously or not, omitted & blocked out (in poetry & in my mind) because it didn’t map neatly onto my conceptions of a liberated, pleasure activism-backing woman. Much of my manuscript-in-progress touches on how sex & desire can get troubled, marred, & complicated (by capitalism & its forces, “gender” & power dynamics, traumas, mistakes, torpor, so on—), & yet. And still.
As a quick & more blithe example, there’s a poem called “Composure” (an earlier version appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue), in which proximity to a certain lover is concurrently met with enjoyment, impassiveness, & dread— an energy, as woo-woo folks say, that I totally lifted from Gregg.
The manuscript’s epigraph comes from the last three lines of the Gregg poem above:
I was bred for slaughter, like the other
animals. To suffer exactly at the center,
where there are no clues except pleasure.
“What role does Plath play for women poets? Is she a model or a warning? I find myself asking similar questions about Gregg. What are we to make of a line like ‘Femininity is a sickness’?”, Nadia Herman wrote in a review of All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems. “…[A]s throughout Gregg’s work, what is powerful is also dangerous. But do we agree? Is the line a declaration of the strength of women or is the line an abandonment of women? Does the line simply tell it as it is, and thus illuminate women’s conditions, or does it help perpetuate those patterns of being? Or does it do both of these things at the same time, with a kind of ironic slipperiness that makes us probe the relationship between utterance and belief?“
All of the above, I think, & that’s so much of what struck me. There’s self-awareness about beauty as an effective lure (/tactic), but the speaker doesn’t seem to care whether this is read as a testimonial, condemnation, both, or something else entirely. Here,the poem seems to say, is the glitchy energy of femininity— which, by the way, I’m taking to mean the experience of moving through the world as a woman.
As the poem goes on, the speaker seemingly comes into a more serene view of her existence. I belong to no one. I do as I please. I don’t need anyone’s blessing. I’ll move when I feel like it. We recognize this language of the empowered woman on her own. But wait, what else? A fish of my own spirit.
After reading “Whole and Without Blessing” at least hundreds of times over the years, that line suddenly jumped out. It felt significant to the poem’s complicated assertion of selfhood in a way that I couldn’t fully identify. In an attempt to gather less inchoate thoughts about that image, & the poem more broadly, I brought it up to the brilliant poet & educator Raena Shirali. Raena had recently finished reading Gregg’s All of it Singing, which I know because I gave her a copy for the occasion of her 30th birthday. (Do you know the self-conscious joke about how poetry is customarily summoned by the wider world for weddings, funerals, & other life cycle rituals, as if to imply that poems only exist to commemorate or affirm the blips of our human lives? Sometimes that call comes from inside the house.)
While the relative lack of critical attention to Gregg’s work is a mistake, discussing her poems with friends has expanded my appreciation & understanding of their pull in ways that are (gratefully!) untethered to the weightiness & formality of scholarship. And what is this essay, if not part of a conversation about recognition?
“[The poem] articulates what women have to absorb into our identities, & our ways of navigating personal & intimate landscapes that have nothing to do with our character or sense of self, or, more importantly, what we want to identify as our sense of self,” Raena said, while I made frenetic bobblehead motions in the video chat. “Also, in an acknowledgment of that forced absorption, & in defiance against it, is to be a fish of your own spirit. Fish are really not sexy. I think there’s something revolutionary in the fish, & in the spirit, which is the closest to a religious epiphany that the poem gets.”
Raena’s astute observations point to how, even as this poem recognizes (but doesn’t resolve—& really, how could it?) the tensions & gaps between “femininity” as ascribed by the world vs. our interior lives/selves, there’s still something revelatory about its assertions. A fish isn’t a conventionally alluring image, & yet the speaker isn’t disavowing her erotic self. Rather, she has come to a part of her life in which she can, to some extent, evade or refuse externally imposed notions of what she must be.
Early in life, we learn—then forget, only to be reminded, again & again, through being alive—that we’re animals. And as we come to understand that we’re animals who are capable of experiencing both great suffering & great pleasure, we come to see the points where they often meet. As Raena & I chatted, we kept returning to the notion that, for women, the disturbing awareness of being unwittingly “bred” to expect/endure violence arrives, pitilessly, as we’re coming into our erotic power & self-conception.
“Thinking about how suffering is part of sexuality causes turmoil when you’re young,” Raena said. “And then you come to absorb it.”
Which isn’t to say accept, or to imply resignation. Gregg doesn’t offer a tidy resolution in any direction—but we see that the speaker is still heat-seeking, still guided by desire. As I was finishing this piece, I came across a video of Gregg reading an earlier version of “Whole and Without Blessing” (first published in 1978; the recording is from 1976). Her charged delivery of that last word, pleasure, is defiant.
There it is, put simply: a self-preservation that isn’t espousing any kind of asceticism. As with so much of Gregg’s work, this poem’s refusal of simplistic thinking or perspective opened a space in me to write into contradictions. To regard the experience of being a woman in all of its complexities & tensions— how resilience within a patriarchal & violent culture doesn’t need to involve denying the beauty & desire that we inhabit or pursue. Pleasure is no incentive for enduring the ugly parts of our animal lives— this breeding, this suffering, this violence—but, when I so choose to move, it remains the gleaming lodestar that I orient my body toward.
Alina Pleskova is a Moscow-born, Philadelphia-based poet & editor. You can learn more about her work on the internet at alinapleskova.com. She's still a punk in her heart.
Love, love, loved this. Thank you!