Louise luck
Tue, Oct 17, 2023, 11.28 BST
Louise Glück was reserved and careful in what she said. She could be distant. She always felt that her real life lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her alone time. With students, she sometimes suggested that they try silence rather than working at all. She believed this might be best for someone who wrote the wrong poems or produced too much.
In her own poems she worked with silence, breaking it, making more space for it, leaving gaps and writing lines that had as much meaning as possible.
When I interviewed her at the New York Public Library in 2017, she talked about the two years of silence, maybe two and a half, that preceded “The Wild Iris,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. She didn’t write badly, she said – she just didn’t write at all. No verb. No noun. She lived in Vermont and barely read anything. Just gardening books.
During this time she only had two lines in her head that came to her out of the blue. But she had no idea where they would lead or what they might mean.
At the end of my suffering
There was a door.
Happiness could not imagine the speaker of these words. But she would treasure the lines and whisper them to herself. She had a few false starts when she used them in a poem. She would even wonder if they would be enough for a very, very short poem.
The voice in the poems was close and sharp, but also wounded and exposed
When spring came she went into her garden. She wrote two bad poems about flowers. In her account of it, she began the book that became The Wild Iris on the third day, with these two lines at the beginning, and wrote all the poems in eight weeks. Some of her later books were also written quickly and with very few revisions. However, she didn’t feel much satisfaction. She hardly had the feeling that she had written the poem herself. It was like she had stolen it or it came from somewhere else.
When Glück wrote a poetry of statement, then there was always understatement, undercurrent. The voice in the poems was close, direct, sharp, but also intimate, hurt and exposed. She was unafraid to write about pain and fear in often self-destructive ways. She lived with the dead as a constant presence, almost like Emily Dickinson.
Louise Glück: Where to start with an extraordinary Nobel laureate?
Although some of the one-line sentences in her poems appear certain and accurate, she was against certainty or a tone in poetry that lacked sharp shock or surprise. She was looking for something new that seemed true in a single, jagged moment. Then her poem could transform into calmer, more powerful music.
When a poem began with a clear, raw statement, it was interesting to watch how she completed the diction with hyphens, semicolons, and strange line breaks.
Your self-exploration could be filled with something personal and intimate, but also surrounded by distancing effects. It was never overtly or overtly confessional. The first person singular in her poems could be simple and familiar, but never for long.
Glück was not afraid to use words like “soul” or “God” or to use archetypes of forest, light and darkness, and sun and moon. But the poems were not abstract. They were poems of hard experience. She has not proven her innocence. The poems were full of emotions that she knew all too well.
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