Louise Glück

On suffering and solace, mythology, and silence





Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize in Literature four days ago. Once someone becomes famous, everyone who has a past connection with them, however tenuous, scrambles to procure evidence of foresight. I’m worse: I have no connection. But Glück is really one of my favorite poets.



Two summers ago, I went on a college tour to Yale, where Glück is an adjunct professor. I located the English building, found the door unlocked, and dragged my dad behind me. I couldn’t find the elevator, so I took four flights of stairs to her office: #415. The door was closed, unfortunately, but I hadn’t really expected her to be there anyways. There was a list of names on her door for office hours. I was surprised to recognize two of the names; they were writers I knew from a summer workshop. How intimidating would it be to learn from Louise Glück? I remember thinking.



I asked my dad to take a picture of me with her door, like it was a tourist destination or the Mona Lisa.



My favorite poetry book by Glück is Averno. The epigraph states that "Averno" is "a small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy; regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld." The full book can be read online here.



It’s very hard to analyze or explain a poem, because the best poems distill so many inexpressible and subliminal feelings into a few lines. So probably the best way to understand is just to read the poems. But I'll try to explain a little bit why Glück means so much to me.

Why Glück

I once wrote about learning to write poetry in a summer camp application. Later, my interviewer asked me who my favorite poet was. I said Glück. But I couldn’t explain why; I started blushing. She writes about women, I remember saying. But that wasn’t the real reason. It was because Glück’s poems expressed pain and helplessness and wanting to be separated from the body and the stillness of summer and what made mythology compelling and the intangible beauty of clouds and light coming through a window and memories of past lives and dreams with birds flying in the night sky. I think I was depressed, which is why Glück resonated so strongly with me. I say “I think,” because it’s hard to admit and harder to describe. I’m reminded of this line from a Jane Kenyon poem: “What hurt me so terribly / all my life until this moment?” I didn’t know why I felt so hurt. I copied down Glück’s poems, with their shifting lines on violence and solace, and reread them at night, in school, on the bus. Glück moved between unrelated memories and storylines which felt strangely familiar. I felt like I had, at some point, dreamed the exact dreams in her poems. Her poems slip into the subconscious mind, which swims between distant threads and experiences. We only have words for singular “emotions," but whenever we feel something really deeply, it's more like we're experiencing myriad storylines and histories. Reading her poems now, nearly three years later, the same lines still resonate with me. Perhaps we are all wounded in a deep place—just by being born, by having a body separate from our mind, by having language that does not describe what we feel. We all have our private theaters of tragedy. Glück articulates a courage to see through our aloneness, to understand the indifference of the earth to our suffering, to see ourselves as small and vivid and very alive.





I'm looking for courage, for some evidence

my life will change, though

it takes forever

[...]

Or was the point always

to continue without a sign?



I am constantly trying to find evidence my life will change, even if I don't know how I want to be changed. Perhaps accepting that I cannot hold onto any one thing is more true, and more beautiful than certainty.



Mythology

A recent Guardian article wrote that Glück was chosen for the Nobel Prize because of her “compassionate, comprehensive vision of human understanding and destiny.” "Human destiny" is written in the singular—not as “human destinies," but as one human destiny. I‘m not sure if this is purposeful in the article, but it’s very true for Glück's work. In the bigger picture, we all converge to a single point, like the convergence of light through a lens, or the vanishing point when drawing in perspective.

"Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works. The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice –- the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed -– are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid.” (Anders Olson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee.)



Some of my favorite Glück poems reimagine classical mythology, usually from the psychological and inner perspective of the characters. We already know their “endings" and entire life stories. Yet their destinies feel intertwined with my own and with the destiny of all humans. We have all been abandoned, punished, and betrayed.



In Averno, the recurring figure of Persephone represents the rift between daughter and mother, the rift between memory and death, the rift between body and experience. Glück rewrites Persephone’s story into a story of human destiny; we see ourselves in Persephone, in her helplessness, even in her eternity.

I read once that all people in Western society have internalized fairy tales, Shakespeare, and Greek mythology. This really struck me. There are myths we've internalized so deeply we do not realize them, and we use these myths to understand and judge the world and others. Every story and experience has an ancient model. As writers, we are really just rewriting the same stories into different forms.



“Mental models” are well-recognized as influencing on our thinking. But what are the storylines we accept as true that shape our actions and decisions? Myths teach lessons or serve as warnings; like Icarus flying too close to the sun or Achilles being shot in the heel. Perhaps Glück, by reimagining mythology through poetry, also reimagines the lessons we should be learning from these stories: that their fates are also our own.



Silence

Glück's poems are vulnerable and ambiguous and create silence. This sounds bad. But i really love what Marilyn Nelson says in On Being:



Poetry consists of words and phrases and sentences that emerge like something coming out of water. They emerge before us, and they call up something in us. But then they turn us back into our own silence. And that’s why reading poetry, reading it alone silently takes us someplace where we can’t get ordinarily. Poetry opens us to this otherness that exists within us. Don’t you think? You read a poem and you say, “Ah.” And then you listen to what it brings out inside of you. And what it is is not words; it’s silence.



And what it is is not words; it's silence.



Readings

Besides Matins and the poems in Averno, here are three of my favorite Gluck poems: Aubade: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjicwwtW0AA4E6_.jpg:large An Endless Story: https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/gluck_su18.html A Summer Garden: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55237/a-summer-garden And some selected lines from Averno, separated with asterisks. I think they still have some power, although diminished, when taken out of the poems: I can’t hear your voice for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground I no longer care what sound it makes when I was silenced, when did it first seem pointless to describe that sound what it sounds like can’t change what it is– * So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate: the ideal burns in you like a fever. Or not like a fever, like a second heart. * The eye gets used to disappearances. * You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared. * I had a dream: my mother fell out of a tree. After she fell, the tree died: it had outlived its function. My mother was unharmed — her arrows disappeared, her wings turned to arms. Fire creature: Sagittarius. She finds herself in — a suburban garden. It is coming back to me. * 13. In the dark, my soul said I am your soul. No one can see me; only you — only you can see me. 14. And it said, you must trust me. Meaning: if you move the harp, you will bleed to death. * I lived in the present, which was that part of the future you could see.

* I want it to be my fault she said so I can fix it * the ice was there for your own protection

to teach you not to feel—

the truth she said I thought it would be like a target, you would see the center— * Once the earth decides to have no memory time seems in a way meaningless. * The terrible moment was the spring after his work was erased, when he understood that the earth didn’t know how to mourn, that it would change instead. And then go on existing without him. * Snow began falling, over the surface of the whole earth. That can’t be true. And yet it felt true, falling more and more thickly over everything I could see. The pines turned brittle with ice. * Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth? And he would say, in a short time you will be here again. And in the time between you will forget everything: those fields of ice will be the meadows of Elysium.