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February 12, 2015 - Image 10

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4B — Thursday, February 12, 2015
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By CAROLYN DARR

Daily Arts Writer

Someone who describes lines

as gorgeous and certain writing
as a miracle can only be a poet.
Surprisingly,
Linda
Gregerson

didn’t start writing poetry until
her early twenties, after she
had finished her undergraduate
education.

“Of course I loved reading

poetry and especially my scholarly
period of 16th and 17th-century
poetry,” Gregerson said. “I’ve
always read Shakespeare, read
Dunn. Dunn was probably how I
first learned how to be in love with

poetry, but I did not feel confident
reading contemporary poetry. It
was just something I was very
frightened of.”

Thankfully, a poet friend took

Gregerson aside and insisted that,
as an avid scholar of poetry, she
must begin to write herself, and so
began to teach her the basics of the
form. Gregerson wrote on her own
for awhile, but once she became
more serious about writing she
started applying to MFA programs
and ended up attending University
of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Today Gregerson values poetry

as both a written, read and lived
experience. She believes poetry

allows its readers and writers to
slow time and truly experience the
beauty of living.

“It’s
a
very
important

instrument for encouraging us to
really inhabit this very fleeting
present
tense,
which
mostly

goes by without our noticing,”
Gregerson remarked. “We’re so
busy with something that just
happened and what we’ve got to
get done next that this moment
mostly suffers from oblivion and
neglect, and yet of course it’s all we
really have.”

During
her
MFA
studies,

Gregerson honed her craft under
such poetic greats as Bill Matthews

ARTIST
PROFILE

IN

VIRGINIA LOZANO/Daily

Poet Linda Gregerson has published five books and teaches creative writing at the University.

and
Louise
Glück.
Despite

associating
with
these
heavy

hitters, Gregerson’s style is wholly
that of her own. Her poems do
not follow traditional or received
form, but rather exemplify those
of her own creation. A common
technique running through a
multitude of her poems is a tercet,
or three line stanza.

“For me two durable compo-

nents always, always are the line
and syntax, and I begin by need-
ing them to resist one another,”
Gregerson stated. “It doesn’t begin
to be written until it’s lineated, so
I don’t do some crazy drafts that
then start going into lines. It’s
about pacing, units of sense. It’s
about how much light and air is
going to be around the words.”

Gregerson has authored five

books of poetry, and has won
numerous awards for her writing,
including the prestigious Kingsley
Tufts Poetry Award and the
Pushcart Prize. It should be noted,
however, that creative writing
was never her original scholarly
pursuit. Hired by the University
in 1967, she originally began as a
scholar of early modern England,
a field that she is still very active
in through both teaching and
scholarly criticism. Today, while
still introducing students to the
lengthy beauty that is Edmund
Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen,”
Gregerson has become involved in
the creative writing department
and mentoring the University’s
up-and-coming poets.

Unsurprisingly,
due
to
the

length and breadth of her poetic
scholarship, Gregerson found it
hard to name a poet she adores
above all others.

“You know I have a million of

them,” Gregerson said. “Well, of
all time I can tell you Shakespeare,
Dunn and Herbert, but (there are)
also 20th century poets who are

very important to me. Lately I’ve
been reading Maryanne Moore a
lot and a lot more seriously. We all
adore Elizabeth Bishop, and learn
a lot from her. Bishop’s villanelle
‘One Art’ never ceases being
revelatory to me. There’s (also) just
a world of wonderful poets coming
up now in America. There’s just
hundreds actually, but on the dear-
to-me list at least scores really. I
feel very lucky to be living at a time
I’m living where there’s this much
that’s good being written.”

I find it shocking that Gregerson

manages to find time to commit to
reading new work as she balances
writing
and
teaching.
Upon

expressing my disbelief, Gregerson
merely laughed and conceded that
though time is difficult to find, she
succeeds.

“It’s a sort of gift in disguise

when you’re required to read
on
assignment,”
Gregerson

pronounced. “Most of us at a
certain point start serving on
prize committees and panels
and judge and so forth. I chaired
a committee for five years that
called for me to essentially read
the year in poetry. That’s what you
do and it’s fabulous. You know, you
read yourself to sleep at night, you
get up early and read, you read on
trains, on busses, you just read all
the time.”

Reading as much as possible

is the primary piece of advice
Gregerson hopes to give to young
poets. Reading and experiencing
life to find new subjects to write
about. Gregerson worries that
those who have only focused
on creative writing their entire
academic careers are missing out
on the lived experience that adds
the grain and color to great poems.

“You
need
more
world,”

Gregerson exclaimed. “You need
other stuff. Go do anything else.
Poetry also needs the texture of

other things, it needs not simply
to be a closed circle. I find even for
people who’ve been writing very
early and know that’s what they
want to do that sometimes the
leaps and bounds forward happen
when there’s a time away.”

As for Gregerson, there is

no halt. Her next collection of
new and selected poems will be
released this coming September.
Its title poem “Prodigal,” an
excerpt of which is printed above,
was originally released in her
collection Magnetic North and
may be her favorite poem ever
penned. All of the new poems in
her collection have a touchstone
in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and
those stories of change.

“There are only two subjects,

right? I mean love and death and
the way we try to absorb the fact
that we live in a world founded
on death, that we are radically
mortal as is the world we live in,”
Gregerson commented. “Love
is probably our big argument
both against death and our
consolation for death and that
inevitable sentence. I think it’s
a business of poetry to help us
navigate that both as writers and
as readers.”

Gregerson
believes
poetry

opens our eyes to the temporality
of the world.

“I think poetry is about

focus,”
she
observed.
“It’s

about trying to be attentive to
the world so we won’t have to
live in complete regret that it
was lost on us while we had it.
I really think it’s to give us an
opportunity to actually say at
some future point that we will
have been here, we will have
noticed what happened. That
we took it in somehow, that we
honored this very fleeting gift
of consciousness, physical life,
companionship, daylight.”

FOOD COLUMN

Finding palatable
classics in Rome

T

o walk through Rome
is to walk through an
architectural timeline.

From Archaic foundations of the
Forum, to Fascist-era govern-
ment build-
ings, Rome’s
constant
inhabitation
for over a
millennium
is palpable.
But the linear
progression
of styles
is far less
interesting
than the rela-
tionships between them. Notions
of “old” and “new” are revised,
renamed, recycled— quite literally,
sometimes. For example, there
is a beautiful, Early Renaissance
church near my apartment, San
Pietro in Montorio, whose facade
may have been built using traver-
tine harvested from a crumbling
Colosseum. This is all to say, Rome

is a city with many different “clas-
sic” eras, each of which reject and
reinvent the others, and each of
which is still visible today.

But Roman cuisine, the food

I identify as “classic,” is a seem-
ingly stable pantheon of dishes.
Carbonara, fried artichokes, tripe
… they’re found on most menus
in Rome, and don’t seem to be
going anywhere. How I judge
restaurants in Rome is usually by
their execution of these classics,
both in comparison to others and
some platonic ideal that I pretend
to have tasted. Most people don’t
go to Rome to taste “new” food. In
fact, Rome is one of the few places
where you could eat on your hon-
eymoon where your parents ate
on theirs.

I have found something “new”

in Rome though. Not “new” as in
undiscovered, for Trapizzino, in
the Testaccio neighborhood, has
earned praise and profiles from
major newspapers in both Italy
and America. Trapizzino is “new”

because they have invented a new
dish which already seems headed
toward canonization.

The namesake of the restaurant,

a trapizzino is a sandwich, but it’s
unlike any other in Rome. The
name is actually a portmanteau
of tramezzino, a small sandwich
served as a snack in Italian cafés,
and pizza. A “trapizzino,” predict-
ably, is a combination of both. A roll
made out of pizza dough is cut on
the diagonal, and the spongy inte-
rior of each triangle is squeezed
open to form a pocket and filled
with braised meats or vegetables.

This marriage of two Roman

classics was officiated by Stefano
Callegari, a former flight attendant
turned-pizzaiolo. He opened his
first pizzeria, Sforno, in 2005, fol-
lowed three years later by 00100,
named for the zip-code of Rome.
It was at 00100, in Testaccio, that
Callegari invented the trapizzino,
and where I first tasted it two sum-
mers ago.

I was living across the river in

GIANCARLO
BUONOMO

Trastevere, and would often stop
at 00100 for lunch or a snack. I
savored their potato and speck
pizza and their suppli, fried
balls of leftover risotto. I viewed
00100 as the place for classic
Roman pizza, and would sneer at
any other place that I viewed as
less authentic. Then, one humid
Saturday afternoon, I stopped
in for a quick bite. As I grabbed
a cold Coke from the fridge and
turned with a practiced motion
to point at the small pile of suppli,
the earringed young man behind
the counter said, “Today, you try
a trapizzino.” Not knowing what
he meant, I said yes, and he hand-
ed me a still-warm triangle of
bread, stuffed with warm tongue
and salsa verde.

I can only resort to cliché, and

say that I’ll never forget that first
bite. The bouncy, fatty tongue,
cut by the acidic, cool salsa verde,
all that zesty flavor soaking into
the chewy, robust bread. I ate
the whole thing in one continu-
ous, hungry, hungry hippo-like
motion, and then, without letting
my mouth rest, called my father
and ranted to him for 10 minutes
about this eighth wonder of the
world.

In the two years between that

bite and right now, I often pon-
dered the trapizzino. There must
have been something beyond
flavor that made me enjoy that
sandwich so much. And I was

surprised how much I had liked
it, because it was “new,” and I
had come to Rome determined
to eat nothing but the most text-
book, traditional cucina romana .

People must have had the

same reaction as me, because
within the last two years, 00100
was renamed Trapizzino, the
pizza discarded, the space reno-
vated and the whole place is
now dedicated to the titular tri-
angle. I visited the other day,
and immediately thought, “this
place would do so well in Brook-
lyn.” An eclectic mix of Soul
and Motown emanated from the
kitchen, along with the aroma of
slow-cooked meats and yeasty
bread. The restaurant has a faux
fast food feel to it — the trapizzini
are served in customized card-
board triangles, which them-
selves rest in between the rungs
of small metal racks, so that in
between bites you can rest your
sandwich filling-side up. They
make their own beer. Even the
neighborhood is hip. Testaccio
was a commercial neighborhood
in ancient times, whose epony-
mous hill is actually composed of
hundreds of years worth of dis-
carded amphorae fragments. For
most of the modern era, it was a
meat-packing district, until the
inevitable influx of young people
and businesses repurposed the
old houses and factories.

Part of me originally wanted

to not like Trapizzino. I wanted
tradition, not gentrification, old-
school, not hip. But Trapizzino is
actually all of these things, and
because of that, is actually more
“Roman” than most places. Let
me explain. Trapizzini are not
“traditional,” in the sense that
no one ate them back in 1930. But
what they’re filled with — oxtails,
tongue, lamb innards, boiled beef
— is. There’s nothing really “new”
about them, other than the way in
which they’ve reinvented and rei-
magined Roman cuisine. Like the
church of San Pietro in Montorio,
they’re a new icon formed out of
old ones.

I’m tempted to call these lit-

tle sandwiches a metaphor for
Rome itself. But then again, part
of Rome’s charm is that it resists
metaphor in favor of unadulterat-
ed joy. After I finished one trapiz-
zino of chicken braised in vinegar,
I ambled inside to give back my
metal rack. I didn’t need another
— I had just come for research.
As I placed the rack on the coun-
ter, the pony-tailed mod behind
the counter looked at me, pointed
to the steaming pot of braised
oxtails and gingerly picked up a
hot triangle from the oven. He
was right — there was no way I
could leave after just one.

Buonomo is eating tongue

sandwiches *wink, wink*. To offer him

yours, e-mail gbuonomo@umich.edu.

THE D’ART BOARD

Each week we take shots at the biggest
developments in the entertainment world.
Here’s what hit (and missed) this week.

Design by Gaby Vasquez

First things first, I’m the mealest

Iggy goes on Twitter rant against Papa John’s Pizza.

I Came Like a Wrecking Ball

Miley Cyrus film enters Porn
Festival.

Teardrops on His Guitar

T-Swift sues former guitar
teacher for “damaging the
Taylor Swift brand.”

Soy Un Ganador

Beck confuses everybody, including
himself, by winning Best Album Grammy.

News Breaking

Brian Williams suspended from
NBC.

Back to Top

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