Poet Rebecca Lindenberg Visits Gettysburg for Reading on Resilience and Chronic Illness
Janet Morgan Riggs Student Center, pictured on August 21, 2024. (Vincent DiFonzo/The Gettysburgian)
By Rodrigo Cabrales, Staff Writer
The English Department hosted poet Rebecca Lindenberg at the Penn Hall Lyceum Wednesday evening for a poetry reading from her latest poetry collection, “Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible.”
Lindenberg is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, poetry editor at the Cincinnati Review and a recipient of several awards, including the NEA Literature Grant and the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship.
During her poetry reading, she sought to explore the human experience through the lens of chronic illness, memory and survival. Lindenberg’s poetry draws heavily from her experience as a person with Type 1 diabetes and confronts the anxieties of living in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, transforming medical challenges and everyday experiences.
“I was like, f**k it. I am gonna write about it. I’ve learned a lot from writing about my life with this condition and the effect that it’s had on my imagination… how memory, the memories we have affect our perception of our present moment… how where we are at any given present moment changes the way that we perceive and reflect upon our memories,” Lindenberg said.
She concluded the reading by offering some personal approaches to writing poetry by saying, “Original art doesn’t often come from extraordinary circumstances, so much as it comes from people perceiving the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Write what only you know. Each one of you who walked into the room today probably noticed something different about the room.”
