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.