It’s her birthday today.
Louise Glück’s poetry sometimes hurts, touching wounds or fears and dreads so deep you don’t want to acknowledge they even exist. It feels like these things might overwhelm you if you give them any space. Glück knew these things existed, and she looked at them. She dealt with what haunted her. She dealt with it by putting it into words. Her sister died before she was born, and Louise was haunted by this ghost sister, a phantom presence which pre-dated her. Glück was about as successful as you could be as a poet. A living legend while she was here. She was the 12th U.S. Poet Laureate. She won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and also the Nobel Prize.
Glück’s poems have a chill clarity which can be a little frightening. There’s a slight remove, though – almost like she needs the remove in order to be able to speak – but she’s not distant or “above”. She’s direct. Her language isn’t fancy or formal. She says stuff like “Now let me tell you”.
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
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: “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.”
Glück’s poem “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.”
Witness is the perfect word.
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