From The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson on Louise Gluck
 

From Dan Chiasson's overview of Gluck's career (pardon the missing umlaut) in the November 11th New Yorker:

Anorexia seems to have been a clumsy early form of writing poetry, focussing exclusively, and therefore tragically, on form; [pscho]analysis, which replaced anorexia by describing it, would then be an improvement, except that it had no form--its truths were inert and abstract. Only in poery could the formal manifestations of insight be explored, a fact that she explores, in form, in a section of "Dedicaction to Hunger," from "Descending Fugure":

It begins quietly
in certain female children:
the fear of death, taking as its form
dedication to hunger,
because a woman's body
is a grave; it will accept
anything. I remember
lying in bed at night
touching the soft, digressive breasts,
touching, at fifteen,
the interfering flesh
that I would sacrifice
until the limbs were free
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt
what I feel now, aligning these words--
it is the same need to perfect,
of which death is the mere byproduct.

*****

While I can certainly understand the poem and its complaints, I can't make much of the critical analysis of it. Opinions?

Would it make more sense if we saw the whole article, Sam? Do you have a link to it? Or isn't that possible with the New Yorker?

Charlotte

Without having read further, I'm guessing the aspects of anorexia being discussed as aspects of "form" are: the feeling of control anorexics seek and which seems to be one of the perceived rewards of anorexia, and the desire some anorexics are thought to have to diminish the visibly feminine attributes of their bodies. It strikes me as a rather over-determined argument about form. I'm not sure why the truths of psychoanalysis are said to be "abstract" and "inert"--I would have supposed the opposite.