A Sense of Doubt blog post #3161 - Nobel Laureate Poet Louise Glück Has Died at 80
Louise Glück died.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/books/louise-gluck-dead.html
Louise Glück, Nobel-Winning Poet Who Explored Trauma and Loss, Dies at 80
Acclaimed as one of America’s greatest living writers, she blended deeply personal material with themes of mythology and nature.
Louise Glück, an American
poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of
classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every
honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in
2020, the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on Friday at her
home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 80.
Her death was confirmed by
Jonathan Galassi, her editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Richard Deming, a
friend and former colleague of hers in the English department at Yale, said the
cause was cancer.
Ms. Glück (pronounced glick)
was widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets, long
before she won the Nobel. She began publishing in the 1960s and received some
acclaim in the ’70s, but she cemented her reputation in the ’80s and early ’90s
with a string of books, including “Triumph of Achilles” (1985), which won the
National Book Critics Circle Award; “Ararat” (1990); and “The Wild Iris”
(1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Her
work was both deeply personal — “Ararat,” for example, drew on the pain she
experienced over the death of her father — and broadly accessible, both to
critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and to the broader
reading public. She served as the United States poet laureate from 2003 to
2004.
“‘Direct’ is the operative word here,” the critic Wendy Lesser wrote in a review of “Triumph of Achilles” in The Washington Post. ”Glück’s language is staunchly straightforward, remarkably close to the diction of ordinary speech. Yet her careful selection for rhythm and repetition, and the specificity of even her idiomatically vague phrases, give her poems a weight that is far from colloquial.”
Her early work, especially her debut, “Firstborn” (1968), is deeply indebted to the so-called confessional poets who dominated the scene in the 1950s and ’60s, among them John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.
But even as Ms. Glück continued to weave her verse with an autobiographical thread, there is nothing solipsistic in her later, more mature work, even as she explored intimate themes of trauma and heartbreak.
“The poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role,” she said in her Nobel acceptance speech. “Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.”
With sometimes remorseless wit and razor-sharp language, she seamlessly tied the personal to the social, the particular to the universal, looping together meditations on her own struggles with themes of family, mortality and loss.
In awarding her its prize for literature — she was the first American-born poet to win it since T.S. Eliot in 1948 — the Nobel committee praised her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
“Bleak,” “alienated” and “austere” were all adjectives one got used to finding in reviews of Ms. Glück’s work. “She is at heart the poet of a fallen world,” the critic Don Bogen once wrote.
Nature is rarely a thing of beauty in her work; it is full of sadness, danger and disappointment. In what is perhaps her most famous and widely anthologized poem, “Mock Orange,” she wrote:
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.
How can I rest?
How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?
But if her work rarely offered redemption, let alone joy, it did seek solace, if only in the acceptance of the world as it is — Achilles’ triumph, in her view, was his realization of his own mortality.
And in mortality and death, she felt, one might find the hope of rebirth. In the title poem of “The Wild Iris,” she wrote, from the flower’s perspective,
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
Louise Elizabeth Glück was
born on April 22, 1943, in New York City and grew up in Cedarhurst, on the
South Shore of Long Island. Her father, Daniel, was a businessman and a
frustrated poet who, among other things, helped invent the X-Acto knife. Her
mother, Beatrice (Grosby) Glück, was a homemaker.
Louise was an intensely
intellectual child. In her Nobel lecture, she recalled one evening, when she
was about 6 years old, staying up late debating with herself what the “greatest
poem in the world” was and unable to decide between the two finalists: “The
Little Black Boy,” by William Blake, and “Swanee River,” by Stephen Foster.
(After much back and forth, Blake won.)
“Competitions of this sort,
for honor, for high reward, seemed natural to me,” she said. “The myths that
were my first reading were filled with them.”
But she was also competitive
with herself, and intensely self-critical. She struggled with anorexia as a
teenager, dropping to just 75 pounds before entering therapy.
“Later I began to understand
the dangers and limitations of hierarchical thinking, but in my childhood it
seemed important to confer a prize,” she said. “One person would stand at the
top of the mountain, visible from far away, the only thing of interest on the
mountain.”
Her condition made it hard for her to attend college, though she took classes at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University, where she studied under the poets Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz.
By the mid-1960s she was
working as a secretary by day and writing poetry in her free time. Soon she was
getting published in high-profile magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic
and The Nation.
Her marriages to Charles
Hertz Jr. and John Dranow ended in divorce. Survivors include her son, Noah
Dranow, and two grandchildren.
Her first book, “Firstborn,”
left Ms. Glück drained and with a serious case of writer’s block. Though she
had said, at the start of her career, that she did not want to become a
teaching poet, she accepted a position at Goddard College in Vermont.
Somewhat to her surprise, she found that she enjoyed teaching and even drew inspiration from it. She remained in the classroom the rest of her life, with later positions at Williams College, Yale and, beginning this year, Stanford.
She published 14 books of
poetry, including, in 2012, “Poems: 1962-2012,” a complete compendium of her
published poetry at the time. Today it is considered required reading by any
aspiring poet — and, arguably, anyone serious about modern American literature.
Ms. Glück won the National
Book Award for Poetry in 2014, for “Faithful and Virtuous Night.” Earlier
volumes — “The Wild Iris,” “Vita Nova” (1999) and “Averno” (2006) — were all finalists
for the award, while “The Seven Ages” (2001) was a finalist for the Pulitzer.
She received the Bollingen Prize from Yale in 2001.
She also wrote two
collections of essays and, in 2022, “Marigold and Rose: A Fiction,” a book that
straddles the line between novel and poetry.
In 2016, President Barack
Obama presented her with the National Humanities Medal in a White House
ceremony.
Ms. Glück was never comfortable with her public prominence, and she worried that being considered a popular, accessible poet was a halfway house on the way to mediocrity.
“When I’m told I have a large readership, I think, ‘Oh, great, I’m going to turn out to be Longfellow’ — someone easy to understand, easy to like, the kind of diluted experience available to many,” she said in a 2009 interview with the blog Scarriet. “And I don’t want to be Longfellow. Sorry, Henry, but I don’t.’”
But she came to accept the praise as a hint of the immortality that she had sought as a child — and an acceptance, on her part, of the tension between the personal and the universal that had fueled so much of her work.
“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium,” she said in her Nobel speech. “They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”
Bernard Mokam and Orlando Mayorquin contributed reporting.
Five Louise Glück Poems to Get You Started
The American writer, who won a Nobel
Prize in 2020, wrote with cool clarity and often puckish wit.
Oct. 13, 2023
To the uninitiated, Louise Glück — who died on Friday at the age of 80 — could feel
like an intimidating or chilly poet, her range of references so lofty and
seemingly private that her work could come off as stern, austere. But to read
her that way was to miss both her cool clarity and her often puckish wit; her
poems, which drew on mythology and nature to explore themes of love and loss
and disciplined engagement with the world, were chilly only in the bracing
manner of a good martini.
It’s not easy to pluck individual poems from her books, since Glück was
particularly adept at conceiving of book-length sequences — each of her
collections is best encountered as a whole, like a Pink Floyd album that
doesn’t readily yield a hit single. Nevertheless, here are five of my
favorites, spanning from her first book to her last, to give a sense of her
scope and evolution.
“Early December in
Croton-on-Hudson”
This poem, which appeared near the beginning of “Firstborn,” Glück’s 1968
debut (published when she was in her mid-20s), does a lot in 11 short lines,
balancing death and desire with a painterly sense of the natural world that
demonstrates her ability to set a scene. “Spiked sun,” it starts. “The
Hudson’s/Whittled down by ice./I hear the bone dice/Of blown gravel clicking.
Bone-/pale, the recent snow/Fastens like fur to the river.” This may not be the
poem to cite if I want to convince you Glück isn’t a cold poet — all that ice
and snow! — but in its second half the poem takes a turn that suggests the
bones it evokes are attached to warm and living bodies, as the speaker recalls
a blown tire on the way to deliver Christmas presents the previous year, and
concludes directly, bluntly, “I want you.” In this way a poem that opens with
death ends with sex, moving along the way from nature (the river) to religion
(Christmas) and ending in human communion. If you’ve never read Glück, it’s a
great place to start. (Read the full poem here.)
“Matins”
There are actually
seven poems titled “Matins” in Glück’s Pulitzer-winning 1992 book “The Wild
Iris,” along with 10 titled “Vespers” — I told you she was good with sequences — but the one I’m
thinking of here beautifully encapsulates the collection’s naked yearning for a
God it can’t be sure of. “I see it is with you as with the birches,” the poem
starts: “I am not to speak to you/in the personal way.” I like the slight air
of plaintive complaint here, and also the way Glück goes on, in what is plainly
a prayer after all, to echo the penitential act in the Catholic liturgy: “I
am/at fault, at fault,” she writes, “I asked you/to be human.” Unlike “Early
December in Croton-on-Hudson,” this one actually does end in death, in another
starkly cinematic image that drives home what a visual poet Glück could be: “I
might as well go on/addressing the birches,/as in my former life: let them/do
their worst, let them/bury me with the Romantics,/their pointed yellow
leaves/falling and covering me.” (Read the full poem here.)
“Siren”
Speaking of cinematic, this poem from Glück’s 1996 collection “Meadowlands” borrows delightfully from the world of
film noir to portray the other woman in a love triangle: “I became a criminal
when I fell in love./Before that I was a waitress,” the opening stanza reads.
The poem continues: “I didn’t want to go to Chicago with you./I wanted to marry
you. I wanted/your wife to suffer./I wanted her life to be like a play/in which
all the parts are sad parts.” If this cheeky swerve into genre and
character-acting feels unexpected coming from Glück, it shouldn’t. For one
thing, she always had a novelist’s knack for inhabiting the characters in her
work (and in fact wrote a spare novel late in life). For another, it
helps to understand that the book “Meadowlands” as a whole is a riff on the
“Odyssey,” taking Penelope and Odysseus and the epic’s other figures as
archetypes for the contemporary marriage the book explores. In that sense
“Siren” is about, well, a siren, of the singing-on-a-rock variety, and we’re
back in the world of mythology and desire that Glück wrote about with such
authority. This time, she just happened to have more exuberant fun with it. (Read the full poem here.)
“Theory of Memory”
Glück’s 2014 collection “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” which won the National
Book Award in poetry, dealt as explicitly as any of her work did with themes of
death and art, and continued her evolution away from her early confessional
poems to a more imagined, novelistic world that centered, in this book, on a
painter at the end of his life. It also embraced a wider variety of forms than
Glück’s earlier books did, with long lines and long poems (the title poem runs
to 10 pages) and a smattering of Zen-like prose poems interspersed throughout.
“Theory of Memory” is one of those, and it has the charming and mysterious
quality of a wry fable or a Lydia Davis short story. The narrator is “a
tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable
attachments," but “long, long ago,” he informs us, “I was a glorious ruler
uniting all of a divided country — so I was told by the fortune-teller who
examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind
you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference?
Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is
hypothesis and dream.” (Read the full poem here.)
“Song”
This is the final poem in Glück’s final collection, “Winter Recipes From the Collective,” a stripped-down
and death-haunted book of just 15 poems that appeared in 2021, a year after
Glück had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It again takes
art and death as its central preoccupations, and this poem — which returns to
the terse lines and stark imagery of Glück’s early career — amounts to a
conversation between the ailing speaker and her ceramist friend Leo, who “makes
the most beautiful white bowls” and is “teaching me/the names of the desert
grasses.” There is an astringency to the poem (which you can read here), and a mournfulness; the speaker knows she
will never live to see the grasses in person. But there is also a kind of hope,
in which we see Glück’s earlier yearning toward God transformed into a plangent
desire for the durability of art: “Leo thinks the things man makes/are more
beautiful/than what exists in nature,” the speaker says, and, a few lines
later, “He is teaching me/to live in imagination.” The poem ends with a vision
that casts Glück appropriately in the role of desert prophet, and offers up a
perfect elegy in its final couplet:
I can see his house
in the distance;
smoke is coming from the chimney
Image
That is the kiln, I
think;
only Leo makes porcelain in the desert
Image
Ah, he says, you are
dreaming again
Image
And I say then I’m
glad I dream
the fire is still alive
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2310.14 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3025 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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