R.I.P. Louise Glück

It’s shockingly easy for life to become rote. It’s easy to allow awareness to drop beneath the surface – or, to be more accurate – it’s dismayingly easy to just exist on the surface of things. This happens mostly when I am stressed out. I don’t have TIME to go deep. And so … I look to art for permission to go deep, when I need it. I look to artists who can shock me into awareness: of the here, the now. Like my friend Allison always says: “Be here now.” Art, books, movies, painting, poetry, helps me step out of the raging river for a moment, and be here now. The BE-ing may not be a pleasant sensation, by the way. A lot of poetry hurts, and this type of hurt is also something only art can provide. Louise Glück’s poetry provided in this way.

Glück’s sister died before she was born, an event which haunted her. She was the 12th U.S. Poet Laureate. Glück won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and every other poetry prize, including the Nobel Prize.

Glück is personal in her work, but not really “confessional”, at least not in the sense many of her contemporaries were. Her poems have a chill psychological clarity which is often rather frightening. Distance is required for a voice like hers, but not JUST distance: if you just had the distance, you wouldn’t sense how personal it all is. She’s backed away, because she NEEDS the distance. Her language is not distant or formal. Her poems have lines like “Now let me tell you”, so you feel like she’s coming directly at you with some truth.

Earthly Love

Conventions of the time
held them together.
It was a period
(very long) in which
the heart once given freely
was required, as a formal gesture,
to forfeit liberty: a consecration
at once moving and hopelessly doomed.

As to ourselves:
fortunately we diverged
from these requirements,
as I reminded myself
when my life shattered.
So that what we had for so long
was, more or less,
voluntary, alive.
And only long afterward
did I begin to think otherwise.

We are all human-
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception. As in
the consecration to which I alluded.

And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occured.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.

In Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt said of Glück: “The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.” William Logan, in The New York Times made a similar observation: Glück’s work is “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse—starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.” Wendy Lesser, in Washington Post Book World, wrote: “‘Direct’ is the operative word here: 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 “Hawk’s Shadow” is a masterpiece.

Hawk’s Shadow

Embracing in the road
for some reason I no longer remember
and then drawing apart, seeing
a shape ahead–-how close was it?
We looked up to where the hawk
hovered with its kill; I watched them
veering toward West Hill, casting
their one shadow in the dirt, the all-inclusive
shape of the predator–
Then they disappeared. And I thought,
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me.

Michael Schmidt wrote that “[Glück’s] firm reticence and her mercilessness with herself and her own experience, in prose and verse, make her an unusually powerful witness.”

Farewell to this powerful witness.