Louise Glück
 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-in-literature


:)

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I'm reading her all day.


Dead End
Louise Glück

I said, "Listen, angel, wean me from this bit."
I said, "Divorce me from this crap, this steady diet
Of abuse with cereal, abuse
With vodka and tomato juice,
Your planted billets doux among the bric-a-brac."
Staying was my way of hitting back.
I tended his anemia and did the dishes
Four months—the whole vicious,
Standard cohabitation. But my dear, my dear,
If now I dream about your hands, your hair,
It is the vividness of that dead end
I miss. Like chess. Mind against mind.
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This is great news. I have been a fan of hers for decades.

Susan

Yes, great news. Her early books meant so much to me. I didn't expect it. I don't follow the who is on first news. Was she on the lists?

Yeah, she's wonderful. She's been an influence since I started. That's a great poem, Jim. (Gjertrud, too)

The poet of post-psychoanalytic privilege. I've read her going on 50 years and have never found anything interesting in her language.

Withdrawn.

She's competent, understated, with a subtle, quiet music.... Actually, that's elevator music, but it still works.

James, my poems consist of words and occasional punctuation marks.

James, my friend, perhaps you should look at the sign beside the door of the Sphere. It's a place where formal poets come to gather and meet and look out the window at the world that has run off its rails. We outliers, the ones who gather out back in the shed without need of windows or props, are the unwashed, to be seen, not heard. You have to expect that the Nobel Prize in Literature going to a poet like Gluck is going to create grumbling and throat clearing, even a little gas expulsion. Were you here when Dylan won it? We must learn from the past. Why someone is even saying one of the loudest poets of the last fifty years is elevator music. It's best for you and I, James, to hold back and let the stewing commence. It's harmless and will be over soon.

Yes, John, I agree. Being that I've only thought that about some of your stuff, Sam, it was also very knee-jerk and unfair of me. And our own work should stay out of this anyway. I've withdrawn my comment.

I think Gluck is an exciting and excellent choice. Definitely a surprise, since her work has a more private feel to it than the usual Nobel winners. Or maybe inward is a better word for it. A bit like Tomas Transtromer in that regard, another marvelous poet.

This is the first poem of hers that blew me away. The spareness, the stunning intuitive connections: it still makes the hair on the back of my neck (such as it is) stand up.

ALL HALLOWS

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Thanks for posting that poem, Andrew. I remember first reading it and hadn't thought of it in a long while. There is a quiet noise in some of her poems.

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With all due respect, Sam, I don't expect formal poets to stand and clap — But her body of work is worthy of the recognition she has gotten over the decades for being a serious thinker about the predicament of being human. Why must she (or any poet) jump through hoops to say something important? To say it poetically well is what's important. Must every day require formal attire? Must every song be framed the same way? Must every work of art conform? I think you're being Sam. That's not a bad thing. But it is a thing. You are a noble representative of the old school, which continues to be new because of poets like you.

She is no more an outlier poet than the strict formalist. If you don't like jazz (or rock or folk or...) fine. But that doesn't make it illegitimate. It doesn't make it easy. I'd be curious to read a poem by you written in free verse. (Have you ever?) What is it you can't see in the poem "Dead End" in post #2 above? It is a brilliant example of rhyme and sound and meter.

And Quincy — Get off the fence and admit that if she were elevator music elevators would be, well, elevating in a way they aren’t with muzak. Louise Gluck is far, far, far from the "elevator music" I've heard that passes for poetry.
John Donne be damned, this year. Bring on the Lucie.
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If it had been I who was judging, the prize would have gone to Jay Wright or Adonis. Glück is an unexpected but not unwelcome choice, there is a freshness to what she brings to the table.
I myself lean toward the loud rhythmic musics of the Walcotts and the surrealists, more than the quiet realists of Heaney and (now) Glück. Saying that, while I personally do not favour toward her aesthetic, I can still perceive the vast talent she has at her disposal.

Regards,
Cameron

From the New York Times story on the Prize:

William Logan, in a 2009 Times review of “A Village Life,” called Glück “perhaps the most popular literary poet in America.” Her audience may not be as large as others’, he wrote, but “part of her cachet is that her poems are like secret messages for the initiated.”
Ms.Gluck herself has expressed discomfort with the notion of her poetry as popular.
"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," she said in a 2009 interview with American Poet, journal of the Academy of American Poets.

Yeah, I've struck a cord with too many people-- what the fuck have I done? Ha. Well, it beats obscurity I suppose. And ensures employment. But I get her on that.

The poems by her posted in the thread are copyrighted material. They should probably be removed and/or replaced with links instead.

James and Jim, I don't care whether a poet is a formalist or not. What I do look for is exciting word choices, memorable lines, interesting rhetoric, and the turbulence of ambiguity that makes me work harder. I just don't find this in Gluck's work, which is not to say that she doesn't occasionally write good poems like the one above. I really doubt that many would rank her at the very top of contemporary American poetry, even though she has many admirers.

Always here for the slamming of Longfellow, so this endears me to her (as does the poem Frisardi posted)

Kevin, man, take a break. Maybe pull a tag off a mattress or take your trash can out a day early. You're going to suffocate beneath all these rules. If Louise Gluck sues us for posting her poems I'll take a part-time job and pay the fines. Breathe, dude, breathe.

As I think I did when we were talking about Dylan, I want to drop in here a quote from what the prize is actually for: "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction".

I find those last 4 words ambiguous and interesting. Anybody want to talk about how they might or might not apply to Gluck? Anyway, it's not just a prize for "outstandingness." FWIW, I don't have much of a take on Gluck. I admire her poems often when I see them, but she is not among the poets who really, really stick with me or blow me away.

I posted this article last time around (where the choice of Handke really vindicated the article's thesis); we don't need to discuss whether dril should win it again, but I do think it has a nice discussion of what "in an ideal direction" means.

I'll shoulder part of that burden, John. How cool would it be to be sued by a Nobel laureate? I'll add her to Notable Lawsuits on my resume. Some universities might dig that.

Could be a worse choice. In the past 24 hours I’ve tried to like her stuff. Not seen everything. Untranslated. In English, American English! Managed to sort of weakly like parts of some. We are ninety degrees apart in lots of dimensions. It isn’t just that I’m male. There are different facets to poetry: imagery, music, humor, story, something that is simply charm, ideas, depth, zest, snark, the flash of opposites. Her content either doesn’t have much of these for me or we are very much out of resonance. She has a low level of most of them, but her music is dilute and what she substitutes for that mysterious thing called “sell” hardly moves the needle for me. Maybe it is because I’m male, since I spent a lot of time with a really good woman who wrote like her. I do respect that sparky umlaut. She’s okay; there have been better. I want fireworks or subsonics now and then. Scope. Not present. Or scope I can’t trust.

What a surprising pick. Still hoping for Anne Carson or Adonis.

As Tim Parks wrote in 2011, the year Transtromer won it, the international pretension of the Nobel Prize is ridiculous. How well can the jurors know the work of the best poets in Yemen or Somalia or Uzbekistan? Is it reasonable to think that a Swedish panel of judges could be so well informed about world literature that their pick reflects the stated objective?

The choice of Gluck is a surprise, pleasing to some, but the concept of the Prize itself needs revamping. Maybe the jury should switch countries every year. That would be interesting.

I find the descriptions of Glück's poetry after Noble prize surprising. Annders of the Nobel Committee spoke of her "biting wit and humor," which made me say, "Humor?" Don't get me wrong I admire her work very much, but the poems I've most familiar with and admire: "The Drowned Children," "The Garden" "Horse" and "Eros" are… well not exactly thigh-slapping. Neither do they strike me as "elevator music" or whatever it is Sam claims they are. And if she has wide appeal I believe it's because one of her themes is the absent person who haunts the narrator – the ghost in the walls, as a friend of mine wonderfully describes this particular form of haunting. And who does not have one of those?

Not bad suggestions, Andrew. One thing that obviously contributed to Glück‘s being chosen is that what poems I’ve seen of hers are staggeringly easy to translate. No toughies there. Why? Because she doesn’t really exploit her own American English. Scant music, little feel for exactitude in sonics (though some); it’s almost all in “imagery” and message without massage; imagery alone, ideas alone, can only get one so far. Suppose one doesn’t ride with the image or the message, what’s left? There are European poets whose message I don’t care for, but whose technique I can learn from. Too many first person pronouns in this post—I expect a typhoon of disagreements, but there it is. She brings me no joy, or not enough to get me onto the bus.

Rob, humor is a notoriously variable quality. I see Gluck's humor as being in the same range as Dickinson's: wry, ironic, understated. When I organized a reading of her work at my university many years ago, it was the double-voiced poems (wife and husband, with one italicized and the other not) from Meadowlands that got the most laughs. But they did get laughs.

Susan

I could've sworn I remember an old post of yours to the effect of "Ewww, Anne Carson". Change of tune?

Probably! I joined this site when I was 15 or so and have said all sorts of things.

Here's an engaging, new article on Gluck by Richie Hofmann.

Cool. :)

Autobiography of Red is probably my favorite book (of new material) published in my lifetime.

[quote=Andrew Frisardi;455535]As Tim Parks wrote in 2011, the year Transtromer won it, the international pretension of the Nobel Prize is ridiculous.




I never understood the outrage over Tranströmer. He seems like a great poet, a much greater poet than Glück. Americans seem always angry when they don't win, and even angrier when a poet they have never heard of wins. How is obscurity a negative? In all honesty I would much rather an obscure Tranströmer than a famous Glück.

I want to second Anne Carson. I have some other poets and writers of fiction in mind but what is the point of throwing them out there?

I didn't take Parks's article as being a protest about the choice of Transtromer. His topic is the Nobel Prize in general. Also, by the way, the American poets I know were thrilled with the choice of Transtromer, so I'm not sure where you're getting that. I have never met anyone who is angry that a poet they never heard of won the prize. I'm quite sure I have never lost sleep over any of the choices.

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Relax Kevin. I really doubt she would object to the poems being shared in this thread. She would likely object to some of the opinions and perhaps put her figurative hand over your figurative mouth, however...

Maybe you're right. I look to the moderators to guide me on such matters.

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When an announcement is made of who has received a prize
I can never say with certainty if they are deserving or if others are more deserving.
Perhaps it's one more way in which I fail to fully service poetry.
I go pull their books out, if I have them, and begin re-reading the poems I have put stars by.
Here is one from "Descending Figure".

The Mirror

Watching you in the mirror I wonder
what it is like to be so beautiful
and why you do not love
but cut yourself, shaving
like a blind man. I think you let me stare
so you can turn against yourself
with greater violence,
needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away
scornfully and without hesitation
until I see you correctly,
as a man bleeding, not
the reflection I desire.

I like that, Bill. There is a bit of Calvino in some of her poems.