This Is Unbecoming in a Poem

Rachel Mannheimer on Linda Gregg.

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser Detail from the cover of issue no. 165 by Tim Eitel.  This week, we've unlocked "Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live" by Linda Gregg, selected from the archive by Rachel Mannheimer, whose poems "The Car" and "New Haven" appear in our recent Winter issue. You can listen to Mannheimer read "The Car" here. She introduces Gregg's poem below. We were never married, but we had planned a wedding, had sent the invitations out to all our loved ones before the pandemic hit. And before that, more simply and determinatively, we had decided to be married. It hadn't even felt like a decision. So that when things became difficult, this raised in me no doubt, seemed only a season to be weathered in our confirmed togetherness. Then, that season ended. Well-meaning people might tell you heartbreak is perfect poem material, but such a significant rupture is hard to write. Where do you begin? With the facts? More than likely, you will have disagreed about them toward the end—disagreed with the person with whom you had most closely collaborated to describe reality. You've been proven wrong about something fundamental; how, now, to trust your mind? What's more, categorically alone in grief, one is practically impelled to pity oneself—and this is unbecoming in a poem. "Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live," one of the poet Linda Gregg's many great works of heartbreak, was published by the Review in 1986. Technically, hers is a poem anticipating rupture—a poem of the preceding lonely season. (Biographically speaking, its publication predates Gregg's divorce from then-husband John Brentlinger by four years.) While the title suggests a self that is divided, resistant, the poem doesn't wallow in debate or doubt; it knows what's ahead. It confronts catastrophe through the transformations of metaphor and a precise attention to image. It anticipates by remembering what it's seen. We begin with that flash of recognition. "This New England kind of love reminds me," Gregg writes, "of the potted chrysanthemum my husband / gave me." The poem will chart the chrysanthemum's languishing, punctuated by "cheap renewal"—though, as a figure of love, a potted plant already implies a certain scantiness. Still, the speaker receives it, she tries. She recounts her daily rituals of care. All the while: "The new flowers / were smaller and smaller, resembling / little eyes awake and alone in the dark." Little eyes awake: she saw. And she sees the true state of things now. The end, when it comes, will be nothing to pity. What is pitiable is the weathering of love's slow betrayal—the earnest, faithful service to some faded form. From now on: "endings more final." Yes. Gregg delivers one of appropriate grandeur.   —Rachel Mannheimer POETRY Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live Linda Gregg This New England kind of love reminds me of the potted chrysanthemum my husband gave me. I cared for it faithfully, turning the pot a quarter turn each day as it sat by the window until the blossoms hung with broken necks on the dry stems. Cut off the dead parts and watched green leaves begin, new buds open. Thinking the chrysanthemum would not die unless I forced it to. The new flowers were smaller and smaller, resembling little eyes awake and alone in the dark. From issue no. 100 (Summer–Fall 1986) To read more from issue no. 100, including fiction by Nadine Gordimer, why not subscribe? You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-one-year archive. Copyright © 2025 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.