68- Th Michigan fpi y Weekeii gizine - Thursday, Ach27,1997
Steinbeck museum creates controversy in native town
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The Michiga4aily Weekend
,a u lt y F o c u s ifYX
U prof., Renaissance scholar
Gregerson utiizes poetic voice w
Los Angeles Times
SALINAS, Calif. - Perhaps John
Steinbeck said it best when he said, "No
town celebrates a writer before he's
dead."
Steinbeck knew this scrabbly little
hometown of his didn't much like him.
Matter of fact, folks here hated him.
Hated his ugly stories. Hated his piti-
ful characters. He wrote of whores and
tramps and drunks, and of those wrung-
out crop pickers, those miserable
migrants. Honored them, he did.
Exalted them. And spat on the growers
and shippers who built Salinas into
something.
The Salinas elite got back at him for
his betrayal. They burned "The Grapes
of Wrath" on Main Street.
But that was 58 years ago. Now that
same Main Street is preparing to host
a $9 million National Steinbeck
Center, due to open in the summer of
1998.
It's controversial, yes. But the contro-
versy is not about whether to honor
Steinbeck. It's about whether the
planned museum does him justice.
With the April 26 groundbreaking
ceremony just a few weeks off, Salinas
has stumbled into a jealous - and
unexpected - debate over how best to
pay tribute to its most famous native
son, the poet of the paisano who won
every major award in literature,
including the Pulitzer and the Nobel
prizes.
The town that once reviled Steinbeck
now argues over what style architecture
would best reflect his values, over how
to craft exhibits that will best convey his
truths.
Is an imposing modern building the
proper forum to honor a man who
recoiled from the "yellow smoke of
progress," a man who spoke for the
poor and dispossessed? Can a muse-
um built around stage sets and film
clips adequately convey the crusading
fire that burns through Steinbeck's
prose?
Patricia Leach, executive director of.
the National Steinbeck Center, says she
welcomes the questions. "Art is contro-
versial," she said. "I think these are
healthy issues to explore."
It took a decade for Salinas to work
its way up to next month's ground-
breaking.
And now, in the town that once
despised Steinbeck, critics assert that
the new museum does not look like
John Steinbeck.
The building's boosters readily con-
cede that the new center will not look
anything like the migrant shacks
Steinbeck wrote about in "The Grapes
of Wrath" or the stinking sardine facto-
ries he described in "Cannery Row."
Instead, they hope the building will be
true to the overall spirit of Steinbeck's
work.
"To us, John Steinbeck's work is all
about strength of character, something
we're trying to embody in the building"
explained design architect Kurt Schultz,
of the Portland, Ore., company
Thompson and Vaivoda.
The center will become the new
repository for the 30,000 tapes, letters,
photos, manuscripts and other archives
now in storage at Salinas' public library.
A room dubbed "The Art of Writing"
will let visitors thumb through copies of
Steinbeck's works in several languages.
There will be a biographical film on
Steinbeck, too, and a timeline of his
life.
By Sarah BIdo
For the Daily
When University Prof. Linda
Gregerson unleahses her poetic voice,
the wisdom and clarity of her language
is unexpected and illurminating.
Embedded in her poetry are thoughtful
answers to all sorts of questions. How
can such weighty subjects as death, dis-
ease and fear be handled with grace?
How can one find hope and redemption
in human tragedy?
Gregerson acknowledged that she is
consistently drawn to the same subjects
of mortality and the uncertainty of life
in her poetry. "I became especially
drawn to these themes when I was no
longer the youngest generation, when I
experienced the precariousness of our
purchase here,"she said.
This may be part of the reason
Gregerson didn't develop her poetic
voice until later in life. "I didn't write in
college. I fled from it, in retrospect"
she said. "I felt that there were skills in
reading and writing poetry that I didn't
understand."
While in graduate school at Oberlin
College, Gregerson came under the
influence of her teacher and mentor,
Stuart Friebert, who encouraged her to
begin applying her unique perspectives
to poetic verse, tapping a talent that had
previously laid dormant. "It scares me
to think something so crucial in my life
depended on one person," Gregerson
said. "Without his extraordinary men-
torship, (poetry) would have been a
road not taken.'
Gregerson began writing consistently
while involved in Herbert Blau's exper-
imental theater company, Krakan,
where she was inspired by the excep-
tional talent of her colleagues and by
their accomplishments when working
together. "There's nothing like collabo-
rative creative work," she noted. In
1975, after six years in the theater com-
pany, Gregerson left to pursue an MFA
in creative writing at the University of
Iowa.
This training opened the floodgates
for Gregerson's creative energy to be
expressed poetically. Her voice is
often funneled into unique three-line
stanzas that don't perfectly line up on
the left margin, lending the poems a
sense of both structure and imbalance.
"What it gives me is some breathing
room for the poem. Otherwise, it
becomes over-impacted, misleadingly
suggesting that it should be read faster
than it should," she said.
However, Gregerson admits that the
tercet has become more than just an
indulgence. "By now, it feels like a
life raft to me," she laughed.
In addition to being a poet,
Gregerson is also a scholar and critic of
Renaissance literature, having pub-
lished "The Reformation of the
Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the
English Protestant Epic" a few years
ago. 'Along with this book of poems,
she has another collection, "Fire in the
Conservatory" to her credit.
Among other awards, Gregerson has
received the Levinson Prize from
Poetry magazine, the Consuelo Ford
Award from the Poetry Society of
America, the Isabel MacCaffrey
Award from the Spenser Society of
America and several grants and fel-
lowships.
Although she received her Ph.D in
Renaissance literature, Gregerson isn't
necessarily directly influenced by poet-
ry from this era. "My head is stuffed
full of 16th-century works of all sorts,"
she said, "but it's not our shared lan-
guage anymore, she said.
If anything, the influence of
Renaissance works is more subtly felt
in Gregerson's poetry, reflected in
structural and temperamental aspects,
which she said "are now like breathing
to me.
"(Renaissance poets) were grand at
allowing for intrusion, for juncture and
disruption ... and for allowing things at
odd with one another to be joined
together," Gregerson said. This merging
of unlikely and often opposing forces
run rampant in Gregerson's poetry. The
dichotomies of life and death, sickness
and health, body and spirit are all
explored. In "The Bad Physician,"
Gregerson delves into both the amazing
possibility and the treachery of the
body.
Gregerson has taught at the
University for 10 years. Originally from
a small town in Northern Illinois, she
lived on both the West and East coasts
before returning to the Midwest. She
spoke glowingly of the University and
of the Ann Arbor literary community,
where you don't have to look far to find
talented and personable writers with
which to share ideas and a cup of cof-
fee.
And what a pleasure to share ideas
with Gregerson, such an acute observ-
er of the human experience. Her wis-
dom explores the most delicate reach-
es of tragedy; she is a poet who, to bor-
row lines from her poem "Creation
Myth;' "will have to teach us some-
thing we / should long ago have known
/ by heart."
University Prof. Unda Grego
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