I spent the past couple days reading and rereading one of my favorite poets, Louise Glück. Glück died last week. My friend Clay Risen did the lovely obituary in The New York Times. “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 case you missed it, I interviewed Clay here one time about his fondness for writing obituaries.
About Glück’s work, I don’t really see the bleakness many people attach to her poems. There’s austerity, yes, but it’s also often stealthy or covert, it’s even sexy, like someone spying on things conducted in the dark. My favorite Glück poem is “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson,” with its gorgeous imagery and emphatic ending:
Spiked sun. 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.
Standstill. We were leaving to deliver
Christmas presents when the tire blew
Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared
Down by a storm stood, limbs bared . . .
I want you.
Glück’s poems can be abstract, but they don’t need to be understandable for me to find them beautiful—I’m more often in touch with the feelings imbued, the intimacy she used to foster connection between poet and reader. Maybe it helps that I consider myself a winter person. I like cold and I appreciate human heat in contrast to it.
“The poets I returned to as I grew older were the poets in whose work I played, as the elected listener, a crucial role,” Glück said when she accepted the Nobel prize. “Intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine. Not stadium poets. Not poets talking to themselves.” I think her great subjects were death, sex, and communion. Danger, prayer, and art. They’re themes and subjects that are perhaps my favorites to see explored in poetry. I mean, I would’ve loved to see her be a bit more gossipy at times, or trash-brow, but you can’t get everything.
Among a bunch of memorials published this week, I liked this anecdote from Elisa Gonzalez:
During my freshman year, Louise taught me to revise. It was perhaps the hardest lesson to learn in a year of hard lessons in and out of the classroom. After my first submission, I wept upon reading, in her distinctive half-print, half-cursive scrawl, “hopelessly conventional” on my poem. At last, I thought, I have reached my limits as a writer; I am mediocre and must learn to bear it. Later, Louise and I laughed about this whirlpool of teen-age feeling. We shared a tendency toward melodrama, and an awareness of this tendency, and thus a suspicion of it, and a weary amusement when confronted yet again with the inability to excise it. (It was also from her that I learned how to laugh at habitual faults without tolerating them.)
It’s through reading Glück that I discovered Crush by Richard Siken and Green Squall by Jay Hopler. It’s through reading Glück, when I was a college student but even more as an adult, that I started to learn how to blend ideas with feelings, or just admit to unknowingness. I read her poems and appreciate her as both a sensualist and a realist, an aesthete and a conversationalist, and one of the unconsoled. Basically, I find company in her work.
I’ll end with a prose poem that was new to me this week, I found it in a round-up of Glück’s pieces, “Theory of Memory,” from her final collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night.
Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet
incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, 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.
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Meditations in an Emergency is a weekly dispatch from writer Rosecrans Baldwin about something beautiful. Paying subscribers receive a Sunday supplement with 3+ things to love, plus a monthly longer piece sent from the road, for some inbox wanderlust ⛰️
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now. His most recent novel, The Last Kid Left, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Titles mentioned in Meditations in an Emergency are stored on a Bookshop list, which pays a commission for any books sold.
That first poem. Ooof. I'm embarrassed to say I did not know of Louise Glück before today, but that puts me in the wonderful situation of discovering her work for the first time, and I'm looking forward to digging deeper. Thank you for your mind- and heart-expanding work, Rosecrans.