This article is taken from PN Review 210, Volume 39 Number 4, March - April 2013.
Published in PN Review 210, vol. 39 no. 4, March-April 2013
Indelible Voice: Louise Glück, Poems 1962-2012
LOUISE GLÜCK, Poems 1962-2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) $40
Reena Sastri
Biographical accuracy aside - 'Poems are autobiography,' Louise Glück concedes, 'but divested'
of 'chronology and comment', 'anecdote', 'personal conviction' (Proofs 92) - we might find in a
vignette of a child's sleepless night, from 2001's The Seven Ages, an image of the future poet:
I turned the light on, to wake my sister.
I wanted my parents awake and vigilant, I wanted them
to stop lying. But nobody woke. I sat up
reading my Greek myths in the nightlight.
(433)
The defining presence of the family, the severity of the child's desire for illumination, her refuge,
or adventure, in the world of Greek myth, suggest a watchful intelligence and an imagination
drawn to the elemental within the domestic. If we can take this as a picture of how Louise Glück
began, however, one of the great satisfactions this book offers is the chance to see how her work,
remaining true to this intensity, has enlarged its vision to embrace stances humorous, sociable,
generous, and even forgiving. These lines' simplicity of diction and syntax proves, across the
poems collected here, capable of an astonishing variety and command. And the wariness of the
nightlit seeker after cold truth comes to coexist with her trust in the enchantment of the words
she reads and those she may write. Unsparing in its dissection of human weaknesses and
vulnerabilities, Glück's poetry is equally unswerving in its underlying faith in words, in the
compensations of speaking and listening.
Presenting complete and in order the eleven volumes Glück has published, from Firstborn
(1968) through A Village Life (2009), this edition in one sense presents no surprises: no
rearrangements, no omissions or additions, no new explanatory notes. But in another sense it
showcases a career replete with the unexpected. Poetry thinks by means of its 'habits of syntax
and vocabulary', its 'rhythmic signatures', and Glück has consciously altered these from book to
book (Proofs 17). Listen to the tonal contrasts between the early work's austere, oracular
distance: 'birds circled the body, not partial / to this form over the others // since men were all
alike, / defeated by the air' (153), and Ararat's intimate, blunt certainties: 'When I speak
passionately, / that's when I'm least to be trusted' (216); or between Vita Nova's rueful analysis:
'Interesting how we fall in love: / in my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and alas, often—' (369), and
The Seven Ages' relentless intimations of mortality: 'You will want the earth, then more of the
earth—': 'it will feed you, it will ravish you, / it will not keep you alive' (421). Turning over the
page from the end of one volume to the beginning of the next, as this edition invites us to do, we
hear these shifts with their full force.
Not for Glück the blank spaces conspicuously resisting reference or closure that appeared, in the
late 80s, in the work of her near contemporary Jorie Graham: although Glück's frequently short
lines leave ample white space, the significant spaces, gaps, pauses in her work are heard rather
than primarily seen. It would be fair to say that for Glück as for Robert Frost, 'The ear is the only
true writer and the only true reader' (Frost 677). Frost famously described 'the abstract sound of
sense' as best attained 'from voices behind a door that cuts off the words' (Frost 664). Glück's
poetic sentences can produce just such patterns in the mind's ear. Take these examples of a
divorcing couple from Meadowlands (1996):
Why is it always family with you?
Can't we ever be two adults?
(323)
You know why you cook? Because
you like control. A person who cooks is a person who likes
to create debt.
(348)
I stopped liking artichokes when I stopped eating
butter. Fennel
I never liked.
(310)
Nuance, inflection, implication are everything here; 'subtleties of timing, of pacing' (Proofs 4)
create the stances expressed. Against the grain of much late-twentieth-century work, this tonebased poetics considers language not abstractly, as an arbitrary system of signs, but in the
concrete, highly specified textures of its use, and so, implicitly, as a social, shared system of
communication. Grounded in possible situations and conversations, words aim less at a (prior)
target reference than at a (future) answering utterance.
Recent collections by Glück's American contemporaries, such as Robert Pinsky (Selected Poems,
2011) and Kay Ryan (The Best of It, 2009), have opened with new or very recent work. Glück
makes the uncompromising choice of beginning at the beginning, with Firstborn's overt
apprenticeship to Plath, Berryman, and Lowell. But this choice, which seems un-self-flattering,
ultimately expresses a confidence in the work as it stands, and attests to an internal coherence
that consists both in continuity and in internally driven change. Her second volume, The House
on Marshland, achieves a breathtaking assurance. Already in place, in the 70s and 80s, is the
quiet authority with which she renders myth and parable. As in Pound, myth is not decorative
butlived. Listen for example to the account of Christ in 'Winter Morning': 'he was seen moving /
among us like one of us // in green Judea, covered with the veil of life'; 'This was not the sun. /
This was Christ in his cocoon of light: // so they swore' (153). Or, in a different register (one
closer to Randall Jarrell), Gretel to Hansel: 'Now, far from women's arms / and memory
ofwomen, in our father's hut / we sleep, are never hungry'; 'But I killed for you. I see armed firs, /
the spires of that gleaming kiln—' (61). Glück self-consciously inherits both the legacy of the socalled confessional, explicitly psycho-analytic, generation, and modernism's ambition, its 'big
hunger'. That phrase is Jorie Graham's. Whereas in Graham myth is abstract and intrapersonal
hence her 'self-portraits' as the gestures between Adam and Eve or Apollo and Daphne, or
Penelope at her loom), in Glück myth is no less existential or metaphysical for being
interpersonal; in this her closest contemporary is perhaps her friend Frank Bidart (though his
explanatory discursivity marks a different temperament than her minimalism).
In the best of the early work, mystery and clarity co-abide. A characteristic strategy sets syntax
against a poem's emotional tenor, as in 'The Drowned Children' (from 1980's Descending
Figure):
You see, they have no judgment.
So it is natural that they should drown,
first the ice taking them in
and then, all winter, their wool scarves
floating behind them as they sink
until at last they are quiet.
And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.
But death must come to them differently,
so close to the beginning.
As though they had always been
blind and weightless. Therefore
the rest is dreamed, the lamp,
the good white cloth that covered the table,
their bodies.
(101)
'You see', 'So it is natural', 'Therefore' assert a disturbingly calm logic. The second stanza's
images, in their domesticity, and by their syntactic suspension, lull, producing the shock of the
list's final item: 'their bodies'. With its disquieting authority and present-tense abstraction the
poem takes on the quality of fixity its closing line gives to the 'waters, blue and permanent' in
which the children drown.
Having established this authority, Glück surprised her readers in 1990 with Ararat, an overtly
confessional, seemingly personal sequence in an utterly flat, unbeautiful style:
My mother wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don't
answer my mother.
(222)
As casual as these lines seem, formal control produces the crucial timing: the line break before
'why' suggests that here the daughter's voice takes on the inflection of the mother's, pulling
against ties of conflict, debt, and love ('I don't love my son,' she confesses later, across another
critical line break, 'the way I meant to love him'). Another poem, 'The Untrustworthy Speaker',
takes on and develops the suggestion in 'The Drowned Children' of foolproof logic warped by a
disturbed point of view:
Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.
I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
that's when I'm least to be trusted.
(216)
The speaker insists she is not objective, yet claims the knowledge and authority of the expert; she
is untrustworthy precisely in her certainty that she shouldn't be trusted. Coming to Ararat from
the otherworldly tonalities of the first four books, what surprises and engages, more emphatically
than the colloquialisms or refusal of adornment, is the extraordinary vividness of its speaker. In
spite of what she tells - the deterministic lesson that 'you never heal' from childhood wounds there is a great relish in the act of saying. And direct address - 'I'll tell you something' (204); 'I'll
tell you what I meant' (203); 'Believe me' (231) - invokes an open axis of interlocution, eliciting
an amused compassion towards the speaker, an affective register distinct from the referential
meanings of her words. Frequently, Glück's tones solicit such conflicting orientations: we feel
addressed, responsive to a desire to be heard, and magnetically drawn into imagining how it feels
to be this speaker, taking on her anxiety, quickness to judge, intense desire for love or for
certainty. The pleasure we take in this experiment involves 'Vicariousness. Voyeurism' (Halpern
4), but also recognition, sympathy.
Ararat's speaker, although theatrical, is staged in a realist mode. Not so the extravagantly
artificial speakers of the book that followed, perhaps Glück's best-known: the Pulitzer
prizewinning The Wild Iris (1992). Here we fully experience the performativity of poetic voice
that so distinctively characterises her work: the 'adamant vitality' of '[i]ndelible voice' (Proofs
91), at once intellectually metalyric and arrestingly felt. Spoken by a gardener, her flowers, and
something very like a god, its poems recall the Psalms, George Herbert, and perhaps most
directly Emily Dickinson in their passionate attitudes of address and supplication. Shared with
Dickinson, too, is an intense engagement with the possibility of speaking out of, or from beyond,
experience so extreme it threatens to extinguish the 'I', or is conceived as having preceded an 'I'
altogether. The wild iris in the opening poem describes a birth:
It is terrible to survive as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
The address to the reader becomes more urgent:
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
(245)
T.S. Eliot described the process of creativity in terms of 'something germinating' that is
transformed into and 'replaced by' the words of a poem, words unanticipated and unanticipatable,
for the poet does not know what he has to say until he has said it (106). These lines suggest such
a process. For all the suggestion of Wordsworth's spontaneous overflow, the poetic voice created
here does not originate in a remembering self. It arises instead out of 'oblivion'. From this
forgetfulness, darkness, otherness, the poem emerges, the resonant fiction of voice ('Hear me
out', the iris says, 'I tell you', 'I could speak') generated textually at the moment of reading.
Preferring poems - 'Blake's little black boy, Keats' living hand' - that 'crave a listener' (Proofs 9),
Glück invests in, but also puts pressure on, the fiction of contact in reading. Her arresting
speakers - Ararat's memorable confessional narrator; The Wild Iris's astonishing flowers and
their ambiguous god - invite at once knowing distance and absorbed enchantment.
All of The Wild Iris's voices - the gardener in her 'Matins' and 'Vespers', the flowers, and the god
figure - share an intense preoccupation with address and with the possibility of response. The
human tries to read the god's signs: 'Is this what you mean us to think ... ?' (255); 'was the point
always / to continue without a sign?' (267). The white rose calls out to the gardener framed in a
lighted window:
Explain my life to me, you who make no sign,
though I call out to you in the night:
I am not like you, I have only
my body for a voice; I can't
disappear into silence—
(289)
The privilege of withholding response is part of the god character's authority. Yet the poetry
imagines his words. He frequently expresses impatience, frustration or disappointment with his
creation, as in 'Retreating Wind':
Your souls should have been immense by now,
not what they are,
small talking things—
I gave you every gift,
blue of the spring morning,
time you didn't know how to use—
(258)
The poems in his voice nonetheless position, inhabit, the human as god's 'you', the addressee of a
powerful and loving other.
Glück's inhuman voices speak urgently to human experience. The latest volume collected here
offers a surprising variation on this strategy. Several poems in the voices of bats and earthworms,
creatures of the night and dark earth, speak from outside the title's village to the lives absorbed
within it. These poems have learned from Marianne Moore: her didacticism, her humour, the
precision of her syntax that enables the reader to follow the twists and leaps of her imagination.
The first 'Earthworm' explicitly recalls Moore's 'A Grave': 'Mortal standing on top of the earth,
refusing / to enter the earth', it begins (574). The second explains,
It is not sad not to be human
nor is living entirely within the earth
demeaning or empty: it is the nature of the mind
to defend its eminence, as it is the nature of those
who walk on the surface to fear the depths—one's
position determines one's feelings. And yet
to walk on top of a thing is not to prevail over it—
[...]
the mind disdains what it can't control,
which will in turn destroy it.
(607)
The syntactic ambition to make sense becomes the object of scrutiny even as it is deployed.
The mind and what it can't control - time, death, above all the body - remain ultimate
adversaries, and Glück has given us some of modern poetry's most memorable responses to this
contest. Yeats's Crazy Jane made the point with a flourish of emphatic rhymes: '"A woman can be
proud and stiff / When on love intent; / But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of
excrement; / And nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent"' (Yeats 260). Glück's
speakers protest against such knowledge. The keynote of the first poem of her first book,
'Chicago Train', is disgust: its speaker cannot turn away from the family across the aisle - the
mother's 'pulsing crotch ... the lice rooted in [her] baby's hair' (5). Not only the body horrifies,
but also the way the body mediates relationships between people. The boundaries of the self are
distressingly permeable; relationships, particularly between mothers and daughters and between
lovers, can be too close for comfort. 'For My Mother' begins 'It was better when we were /
together in one body' (62); the often anthologised 'Mock Orange' resents sexual love's 'low,
humiliating / premise of union' (147). It is a mystery that the body can be unmarked by passion:
one poem evokes 'a girl after her first lover / turning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked,
looking for a sign' (168); another imagines a lover's kiss as 'hot wax on my forehead. / I wanted it
to leave a mark: / that's how I knew I loved you' (168).
Plath, even while she deconstructs the trappings of femininity, is capable of imagining the
creativity of the mind and that of the body as mutually enhancing: Ariel's bee sequence implicitly
aligns pregnancy, haunting or possession, and poetic inspiration. In Glück, the mind and the body
are at odds, and sexuality opposes vision, intellect, creativity: 'why did we worship clarity, / to
speak, in the end, only each other's names, / to speak, as now, not even whole words, / only
vowels?' (173); only when a 'deep isolation' returns to these lovers can they become 'artists
again' (175). The cultural meanings of femininity are suspect; no less is coming to inhabit gender
as stark complementarity: 'She can't touch his arm in innocence again. / They have to give that up
and begin / as male and female, thrust and ache' (105).
Mind, soul, spirit, press back against body, earth, matter:
They are not
reconciled. The body
here, the mind
separate, not
merely a warden:
it has separate joys.
It is the night sky,
the fiercest stars are its
immaculate distinctions—
(469)
No less so when they insist on the futility of resistance:
I caution you as I was never cautioned:
you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
[...]
You will want the earth, then more of the earth—
Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.
Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.
(421)
The 'great task,' Glück wrote in 2005, is 'to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the
inchoate, the chaotic' (Siken vii). The way the incantatory repetitions of 'The Sensual World'
work with, rather than against, sentence structure represents one way for poetry to draw on the
power of what, as meaning-making, it opposes.
In Averno - after The Wild Iris, Glück's most haunting and compelling volume - these chthonic
forces enter via a gap, break, or divide in consciousness: 'there is a rift in the human soul / which
was not constructed to belong / entirely to life' (504). Its title referring to a crater lake thought to
be the entrance to the underworld, Averno retells the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Explicitly
the girl child confined by a limiting script for gendered maturity, the daughter transferred
between possessive mother and possessive lover, Persephone at the same time represents the
human soul divided between earthly life and death. The poems keep both dynamics in play. Earth
as Demeter engulfs:
What is she planning, seeking her daughter?
She is issuing
a warning whose implicit message is:
what are you doing outside my body?
(553)
Persephone escapes this grasp only by succumbing to another, equally irresistible. She is unsure
how to name Hades:
All the different nouns—
she says them in rotation.
Death, husband, god, stranger.
(532)
The rifts opened by the traumas Persephone names - mortality, sexuality, the spiritual,
confrontation with others - turn out, Glück suggests, to be the spaces of poetry.
In the fifty years mapped by Poems 1962-2012 American poetry has been marked by various
forms of suspicion: of formalism; of the so-called scenic mode of naturalistic observation and
personal epiphany; of the first person, grammar and narrative, the notion of poetry as
representing or enacting communication between persons. Thoughtfully responsive to such
suspicions in her essays (collected in the indispensable Proofs and Theories) and in the generous
and instructive forewords to the volumes she selected as editor, from 2004 to 2010, of the Yale
Younger Poets series, Louise Glück foregoes these rejections. On guard against easy emotion,
she is equally suspicious of easy rebellion, predictable experiment, the equation of popular
gestures (fragmentation, non sequitur, the wilfully arbitrary) with serious thought or
philosophical curiosity. That the latter may thrive in the company of wry humour, psychological
study, anecdote, these trenchant, seductive, vital poems amply demonstrate. They take shape less
in response to the failure of word and thing to coincide than in resistance to 'the formless / grief
of the body, whose language / is hunger—' (113). Language, honed with the poet's unsurpassable
ear and passionate imagination, makes a stay against this formlessness.
Works cited
Eliot, T.S.On Poetry and Poets. 1943. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2009.
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose & Plays. New York : Library of America,1995.
Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. New York: Ecco Press/HarperCollins,
1994.
Halpern, Nick. 'Louise Glück's "I"'. Literature Compass 2.1 (January 2005), n.p.
Siken, Richard. Crush. Foreword by Louise Glück. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.
Yeats, W.B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Richard Finneran. New York: Macmillan,
1989.
This article is taken from PN Review 210, Volume 39 Number 4, March - April 2013.