Life can become rote. I look to art to deepen my awareness. I have good friendships, a great family, and do not live life in shallow waters. I sometimes wish I were more shallow, it might be easier, but such as we are made. Things like art, or books, or movies, painting, or poetry, can help me stop for a moment, and think. Or BE. It may not be a pleasant sensation, a lot of poetry hurts, but that’s also something that art can provide. And Louise Glück’s poetry provides. She was born on this day.
Glück’s sister died before she was born, an event which haunts her, haunts perhaps every poem she has written. She has won the Pulitzer Prize, she was the 12th U.S. Poet Laureate, she won the Bollingen Prize and every other poetry prize. Her stuff has a coldness to it, a chill psychological clarity which I often find rather frightening.
Glück is not really “confessional”, at least not in the sense many of her contemporaries were, although her poems are very personal. She steps back and tells us what it’s like. Her language is spare, her line lengths short, giving it a conversational feel. She includes lines like, “Now let me tell you” or “I am telling you”, and when Glück says something like that, batten down the hatches. She’s coming at you with some big truth. And she will say it with no euphemism, no softening. Her poems can be quite devastating. She obscures, even as she reveals.
“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.
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.
QUOTES:
Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets
The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.
Louise Glück:
One of the revelations of art is the discovery of a tone or perspective at once wholly unexpected and wholly true to a set of materials.
Helen Vendler:
Her poems have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words, which are often thought to represent two camps in the life of poetry. What a strange book The Wild Iris is, appearing in this fin-de-siecle, written in the language of flowers. It is a lieder cycle, with all the mournful cadences of that form. It wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection.
Rosanna Warren:
[Glück’s] power [is] to distance the lyric ‘I’ as subject and object of attention [and to ] impose a discipline of detachment upon urgently subjective material.
William Logan, New York Times:
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, Washington Post Book World:
‘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.
Helen Vendler:
Glück’s cryptic narratives invite our participation: we must, according to the case, fill out the story, substitute ourselves for the fictive personages, invent a scenario from which the speaker can utter her lines, decode the import, ‘solve’ the allegory…Later, I think…we read the poem, instead, as a truth complete within its own terms, reflecting some one of the innumerable configurations into which experience falls.
Michael Schmidt:
[Glück’s] firm reticence and her mercilessness with herself and her own experience, in prose and verse, make her an unusually powerful witness.
