| Louise Glück |
The 64-page ‘prose narrative’ Marigold and Rose: A Fiction – about twins in the first year of life – will be published in October
The first work of fiction by American poet and Nobel laureate Louise Glück is to be published in the UK later this year.
| Louise Glück |
The Nobel prize-winning poet’s first novel is a subversive, sophisticated vision of the first year in the lives of twin girls
When the American poet Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2020, the Swedish Academy commended her “voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. They might have added that she makes the individual female experience universal, joining it to the canon of male mythology in ways even her titles make clear. The Seven Ages, from 2001 – a stunning reflection on human destiny – was preceded by both The Triumph of Achilles (1985) and Ararat (1990), for example, and followed by Averno (2005), named after the traditional site of the entrance to hell. While her earlier work explores family psychodrama, these books portray the emotional violence of mid-life. In 13 poetry collections and two volumes of essays, Glück’s emotional intelligence never surrenders to cosy consolation, yet the writing remains exquisitely beautiful.
| Louise Glück |
LETTERS
The effects of having your life overshadowed by the death of a sibling before you were born should be examined, writes Mary Adams
Friday 2 December 2022
In her review of the Nobel prize-winning poet Louise Glück’s new novel, Marigold and Rose, which recreates the first year of life for twins, it is a shame that Fiona Sampson (The babies’ tale, 25 November) does not mention the fact that Glück’s life was overshadowed by the death of a sister before Glück was born.
| Louise Glück |
Louise Glück, poet and Nobel laureate, dies at 80
Acclaimed American poet and Nobel laureate in literature Louise Glück has died at the age of 80.
She received a Nobel in 2020, becoming the first American poet to win the honour since TS Eliot more than 70 years earlier.
| Photo by Laura Makabresku |
This poem by the Nobel laureate is a fierce short parable about environmental devastation
The Red Poppy
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
| Louise Glück |
I
| Louise Glück |
“As soon as I can place myself and describe myself—I want immediately to do the opposite thing,” Louise Glück says. Yet her desire for the unexpected is a constant: she says that she wrote her second book, The House on Marshland, in response to a review of her debut, Firstborn, that claimed to know “what we can expect from Louise Glück in the future.” Glück has many times emphasized the need for change in accomplishing the poet’s work: “If I have any message to any of you who write, it’s that you cannot sit calmly repeating yourself.” This failure is serious because “[t]he dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden.”
Por un dólar / Conversación con Louise Glück
Dana Levin: I wanted to start by asking about your book, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). Time feels spatial in the book, as if all the book's varied voices are speaking, events are happening, in a simultaneous temporal moment.
Louise Glück: There's something very strange in these poems that I've been unable to put my finger on. It's certainly not a willed or deliberate quality, but it has to do with that simultaneity. And it strikes me that the book has something in common with "Landscape," a poem in Averno, in which the stages of a life are represented by individual sections, but the narrative elements and even the point of view shift from section to section—and yet what's represented is the whole of a life. It occurred to me that A Village Life engages that horrible axiom that, at the end of your life, as you're dying, the whole of your life floods back. That's what the book feels like to me: the whole of a life, but not progressive, not narrative: simultaneous. And there's no drama attendant in the idea of dying. It's beyond the drama of the forfeit of the world; it's just a long exhalation.
DL: What did the book teach you aesthetically?
LG: I think I won't even know until I try to do something else. I remember talking to Richard Siken after Averno. I wasn't writing, and I was beginning to fret about it. I go through periods—long periods—of not writing. And sometimes that's not the focus of my anxiety. It's not that I am without anxiety, it's that my anxiety is in some other place; then all of a sudden I become preoccupied with my silence and quite panicky. I was entering that period and Richard said, 'Your next book has to be completely different, just sort of playing in the mud.' And that was exactly my feeling, that I had done everything I could do at the moment with poems operating on a vertical axis of transcendence and grief. And this new manuscript had to be more panoramic, somehow, and casual, with a kind of unbeautiful surface. So it taught me how to write an unbeautiful surface. What a triumph. [sardonic laugh]
Just to be able to write a longer poem, I think, was interesting… I had tremendous pleasure writing these poems. I loved being in that world. And I could get there almost without effort. Well, for a short period. You know, now I can't go…
DL: You can never go back to Brigadoon.
LG: No, never! I can't go back to any of these places. None of them. I never re-read my old work, so I don't even know what I think of it.
DL: Each of your books presents a voice recognizably yours, and yet one can also track distinct formal shifts from one collection to the next. Have such shifts in approach been a conscious aim?
LG: I think the only conscious aim is the wanting to be surprised. The degree to which I sound like myself seems sort of a curse.
DL: [laughs] That reminds me of Wallace Shawn saying, 'I think there's something idiotic about the self, that every day you have to get up and be the same person.'
LG: Yeah! That's the limitation. I'm glad if it also can seem a virtue.
DL: I know you take teaching very seriously, and that for over a decade you have been a public champion of the work of emerging writers. How do mentorship and teaching affect your life?
LG: Ah, how to begin. This is assumed to be an act of generosity on my part: teaching and editing. I cannot too strenuously make another case. I don't think anybody does anything that takes this much time, outside the Catholic church, without a motive of intense self-interest. What I do with young writers I do because it's fuel for me. And sometimes I tell the winners of these contests that I'm Dracula, I'm drinking their blood.
I feel quite passionately that the degree to which I have, if I have, stayed alive as a writer and changed as a writer, owes much to the intensity with which I've immersed myself in the work, sometimes very alien work, of people younger than I, people making sounds I haven't heard. That's what I need to know about.
Virtually every young writer about whose work I've been passionate has taught me something. From you, I've learned one way of keeping a poem going. Long lines. It's not that I ever wrote anything that sounds like you, but I was certainly trying to. When I read Peter Streckfus's work and fell completely under the spell of that work, I found myself writing a poem I thought I stole from him. And was alarmed and carefully read through the book that won the Yale that year, as well as the manuscript, and I could not find what I had written in his work, but I felt I had to call him and apologize.
DL: How did he take that?
LG: Peter's attitude toward what I consider to be theft is very different. He said, 'Oh, I think this is just wonderful. That's what writers do. We're in dialogue.' And I said, 'Peter, you don't understand—I stole!' But, you know, in every literal way I hadn't. The words were mine. But I knew where the impulse, the stimulus, had come from. And then I tried to do things with it that in fact I hadn't seen in Peter's work, so that I would feel it was mine.
DL: Did you ever hope for or imagine the large readership and current acclaim that your work enjoys? When you look back on the trajectory of your public career, what do you think or feel?
LG: I have no perception of large readership and acclaim.
DL: I can testify: it's out there.
LG: When I go to a reading, when I give a reading—first of all, you're standing in the front of the room, you see the empty seats. And you see only the empty seats. It's because you were raised by a mother who said, 'Why did you get 98? Why didn't you get 100?'
DL: I had that mother too!
LG: Yes, I know you did. So you see the empty seats, and people leave during the course of the reading and you see them leave, and you think: they are simply the more blunt representations of the feeling of the whole room. That everybody wants to leave, but only a few daring ones do. So that's how that feels. And acclaim? I've had as many terrible, condescending reviews or those that damn with faint praise: 'Well, if you like this sort of thing, then here's more of it.'
So I have no feeling of acclaim. When I'm told I have a large readership, I think, 'Oh great, I'm going to turn out to be Longfellow': somebody easy to understand, easy to like, the kind of diluted experience available to many. And I don't want to be Longfellow. Sorry, Henry, but I don't. To the degree that I apprehend acclaim, I think, Ah, it's a flaw in the work.
DL: As if: if they knew better, they wouldn't read you at all?
LG: When they know better, they won't read me at all.
DL: Well, I have a student right now who likes to talk about entry fees; you know, how much does it cost to enter this poem? And he recently said to me, 'The entry fee for a Louise Glück poem is, like, a dollar, but once you get in, the territory is complex.' And it's true: your poems are not difficult to enter, but they quickly prove very complicated psychologically and complicated formally, not least in how the poems work together to create a greater whole. My student set out to track your entire body of work but can't seem to quit reading Ararat. He's lost in there, even though he only paid a dollar to get in. I'm going to have to retrieve him so we can move on.
LG: Well, that would be nice if it were true. I hope it's true.
DL: Last question. We are living in some extraordinary times and I know, for myself, I'm often wrestling with this: what does it mean to be personally and psychoanalytically oriented on the page at a moment when so much is happening in the culture socio-politically, environmentally? Many of my students are thinking hard about how personal experience fits into public statement and vice versa, questions of audience and timeliness and cultural import. Do you have any thoughts on this?
LG: I don't think you necessarily answer these questions by consciously wrestling with them. I think they weigh on you, and solutions are to some degree worked out unconsciously. They manifest themselves, these partial solutions, in your work. I never think of audience. I hate that word. I think of a reader. I think my poems want a reader, and they're completed by a reader. But it's the single reader, and whether that person exists in multiple or not makes no spiritual difference, though it has practical impact. What matters to me is the reader's subtlety and depth of response and whether these prove durable. The idea of enlarging the audience for poetry seems to me ludicrous.
I think the poem is a communication between a mouth and an ear—not an actual mouth and an actual ear, but a mind that sends a message and a mind that receives it. For me, the aural experience of a poem is transmitted visually. I hear with my eyes and dislike reading aloud and (except on very rare occasions) being read to. The poem becomes, when read aloud, a much simpler, sequential shape: the web becomes a one-way street. In any case, the knowledge, or hope, that the reader exists is a great solace.
This article originally appeared in American Poet, the biannual journal of the Academy of American Poets. Copyright © 2009 by the Academy of American Poets. All rights reserved.
Ecco Press, $22
by Elizabeth Macklin
November 1996
Over the past 30-odd years, the poet Louise Glück has been a problem-solver, an increasingly lyrical engineer of diagnosis and analysis. And, since Ararat (1990), part of her skill has been to disclose her own tools at work, though it's the current she reveals, more than the circuitry. A first-time reader read through her book The Wild Iris (1992) thinking, "And this 'you'-is it plural or singular, vocative or imperative, formal or familiar?" Of course, the true dilemma in The Wild Iris was the nature of a human identity: Is it divine or is it vegetal, or is it actually somehow human?
Summer 1996
Meadowlands. By Louise Glück. Ecco Press. $22.00.
Since Homer introduced that wily traveler Odysseus to the world, countless poets have attempted to resurrect the tale and make it their own. Odysseus’ ten-year voyage home has become an undeniable part of our collective unconscious. Children draw a Cyclops on one page and the action figure du jour on the next. In a similar gesture, poets major and minor have dipped into the Iliad and Odyssey for their own poems; just in the past few decades, poets as diverse as Marilyn Hacker, Richard Wilbur, Margaret Atwood, Michael Longley, and Yannis Ritsos have devoted poems to Odysseus or to aspects of his journey (Circe seems to be particularly alluring of late). Now, Louise Glück, perhaps our most accomplished rewriter of classical and Biblical narratives, inhabits Odysseus’ world and transforms it into her own in her newest collection, Meadowlands.
FAITHFUL AND Virtuous Night — Louise Glück’s title is at once familiar and utterly strange. In this, it’s like the book it titles. One can keep faith or be faithful during the night — virtues, to be sure — but how could the night be faithful, and to whom? The night could be faithful to you by dependably returning, but one tends to think that regularities of nature lack virtue and vice, unless you’re a child. Faithful, then, to something greater than itself? And here the image emerges, dreamlike and dreamy in classically galloping dactyls: a faithful and virtuous knight, sturdy and chivalrous, questing.
| Louise Glück |
“Toward his critics,” Louise Glück wrote in one of her best essays, “the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.”
That may sound peculiar coming from Glück. It’s tough to imagine that a poet as distinctive and restless as she is would trust much in her champions, much less her critics. What’s more, she might seem an unlikely celebrant of the future. Few living poets have dwelt as successfully on the past. Often employing the idioms of depth psychology — the analytic koans, the mythic analogies — she tends to approach her narratives of familial and erotic love from this side of their endings, and with more than a touch of fatalism.