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.

