{"id":152111,"date":"2023-10-13T19:33:07","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T23:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=152111"},"modified":"2024-08-23T16:59:31","modified_gmt":"2024-08-23T20:59:31","slug":"its-the-birthday-of-poet-louise-gluck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=152111","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P. Louise Gl\u00fcck"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/i>, and this type of hurt is also something only art can provide. Louise Gl\u00fcck’s poetry provided in this way. <\/p>\n

Gl\u00fcck’s sister died before she was born, an event which haunted her. She was the 12th U.S. Poet Laureate. Gl\u00fcck won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and every other poetry prize, including the Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Gl\u00fcck 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. <\/p>\n

Earthly Love<\/big><\/b><\/p>\n

Conventions of the time
\nheld them together.
\nIt was a period
\n(very long) in which
\nthe heart once given freely
\nwas required, as a formal gesture,
\nto forfeit liberty: a consecration
\nat once moving and hopelessly doomed.<\/p>\n

As to ourselves:
\nfortunately we diverged
\nfrom these requirements,
\nas I reminded myself
\nwhen my life shattered.
\nSo that what we had for so long
\nwas, more or less,
\nvoluntary, alive.
\nAnd only long afterward
\ndid I begin to think otherwise.<\/p>\n

We are all human-
\nwe protect ourselves
\nas well as we can
\neven to the point of denying
\nclarity, the point
\nof self-deception. As in
\nthe consecration to which I alluded.<\/p>\n

And yet, within this deception,
\ntrue happiness occured.
\nSo that I believe I would
\nrepeat these errors exactly.
\nNor does it seem to me
\ncrucial to know
\nwhether or not such happiness
\nis built on illusion:
\nit has its own reality.
\nAnd in either case, it will end.<\/p>\n

In Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, Michael Schmidt said of Gl\u00fcck: “The austerely beautiful voice that has become her keynote speaks of a life lived in unflinching awareness.” William Logan, in The New York Times<\/em> made a similar observation: Gl\u00fcck’s work is “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse\u2014starved 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<\/em>, wrote: “\u2018Direct\u2019 is the operative word here: Gl\u00fcck\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n

Her “Hawk’s Shadow” is a masterpiece.<\/p>\n

Hawk’s Shadow<\/big><\/strong><\/p>\n

Embracing in the road
\nfor some reason I no longer remember
\nand then drawing apart, seeing
\na shape ahead\u2013-how close was it?
\nWe looked up to where the hawk
\nhovered with its kill; I watched them
\nveering toward West Hill, casting
\ntheir one shadow in the dirt, the all-inclusive
\nshape of the predator\u2013
\nThen they disappeared. And I thought,
\none shadow. Like the one we made,
\nyou holding me.<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt wrote that “[Gl\u00fcck’s] firm reticence and her mercilessness with herself and her own experience, in prose and verse, make her an unusually powerful witness.”<\/p>\n

Farewell to this powerful witness. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,9],"tags":[2713,160],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=152111"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":193909,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152111\/revisions\/193909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=152111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=152111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=152111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}