Linda Gregg Award-Winning Poet Dies From Cancer at at 76

Award-winning poet Linda Gregg died in Manhattan on March 20, 2019. She was 76 years old.

Gregg started her career as a poet at the age of 40 when she published in 1981 “Too Bright To See.” W.S. Merwin praised her poems saying that they were original in a way that matters.

Following her first work, many more volumes of poetry followed.

The Poetry Foundation said Gregg’s poetry is inseparable from the unrolling, surprising, eventful, a current of language which conveys the pain of loss, an utterly and steady personal radiance.

In 2009, Greg was awarded by Poets & Writers the Jackson Poetry Prize which was $50,000. They said the award honored “A poet of exceptional talent who deserves to be widely recognized.

Gregg said in an essay she published “I think poetry is at its best if it is found rather than being written. What matters the most is what a poem discovers deep down than pleasures and gracefulness in figures of speech.”

She often said when a person reads a poem, the emphasis should be not on the surface, but the inside. The packaging is not necessary; what is important is the content.

Written by Barbara Sobel

Sources:

The Washington Post: Linda Gregg, award-winning poet of lines like ‘chiseled marble,’ dies at 76

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