Louise Glück (1943–2023)

Liberation

My mind is clouded,
I cannot hunt anymore.
I lay my gun over the tracks of the rabbit.

It was as though I became that creature
who could not decide
whether to flee or be still
and so was trapped in the pursuer's eyes-

And for the first time I knew
those eyes have to be blank
because it is impossible
to kill and question at the same time.

Then the shutter snapped,
the rabbit went free. He flew
through the empty forest

that part of me
that was the victim.
Only victims have a destiny.

And the hunter, show more who believed
whatever struggles
begs to be torn apart:

that part is paralyzed. show less

I was rather hoping that "American originality" would turn out to be one of those famous oxymorons, like "British cuisine" or "military intelligence", but apparently it's not: in the title essay of this collection of twenty years' worth of prose writings (mostly) about poetry, Glück suggests that originality in the arts in America has to tie into the American imperative of self-creation. Poets have "to break trails, to found dynasties ... to be capable of replication". Whitman, Pound and show more Dickinson can be revered as founding fathers of one sort or another, but someone like Seamus Heaney would never have done as an American, as Glück considers him inimitable.

The collection continues with a group of other essays on "big topics" in poetry (and a stray 500 words on Thomas Mann, which is all in the magnificently concrete first sentence: "Buddenbrooks ends when there are no men left"). Then there are ten introductions Glück wrote for the winners in "first book" competitions for new poets that she judged, fortunately all well-stuffed with examples so that they make sense as standalone pieces, and finally a small group of slightly more subjective essays on "Revenge", "Estrangement" and "Fear of happiness" in poets.

There's not much clue to Glück herself in these essays, though: a lot of fierce, clear thinking and very pared down prose full of abstract nouns. Blink and you'll have to go back a paragraph to make sense of what you're reading. She approves of poets who go all out in their work, she seems to prefer poems that use complete sentences to sterile grammatical experimentation, and she writes in defence of narrative and humour in lyric verse. She evidently has no time for cliché in her own writing or anyone else's, and she doesn't seem to care much for rhetoric. But the ten introductions cover a very wide range of types of writing, so she clearly values commitment, ability and originality more than conformance to any particular template.

Great critical writing, all about the work with the egos of both the critic and the author firmly relegated to the background. show less

To such endless impressions
we poets give ourselves absolutely,
making, in silence, omen of mere event,
until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.

Averno is poetic eschatology—a rumination on the end, meaning, believing, understanding. Reflections on Persephone, dead or kidnapped, making sense of things chthonic, paired with a young girl's loss of innocence after burning a wheat field to ash. Glück peers into the "pit of disappearance," takes heed of what she sees there, and show more renders tentative revelations:

All your life, you wait for the propitious time.
Then the propitious time
reveals itself as action taken.

&

You die when your spirit dies.
Otherwise, you live.
You may not do a good job of it, but you go on—
something you have no choice about.

&

But ignorance
cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists. show less

Persephone the Wanderer

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we known of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

Persephone’s initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her show more will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
”home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivable,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

Asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
As we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

As an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs.
about her mother’s
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mystic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

####################################

In the second version, Persephone
is dead. She dies, her mother grieves —
problems of sexuality need not
trouble us here.

Compulsively, in grief, Demeter
circles the earth. We don’t expect to know
what Persephone is doing.
She is dead, the dead are mysteries.

We have here
a mother and a cipher: this is
accurate to the experience
of the mother as

she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks:
I remember when you didn’t exist. The infant
is puzzled; later, the child’s opinion is
she has always existed, just as

her mother has always existed
in her present form. Her mother
is like a figure at a bus stop,
an audience for the bus’s arrival. Before that,
she was the bus, a temporary
home or convenience. Persephone, protected,
stares out the window of the chariot.

What does she see? A morning
in early spring, in April. Now

her whole life is beginning — unfortunately,
it’s going to be
a short life. She’s going to know, really,

only two adults: death and her mother.
But two is
twice what her mother has:
her mother has

one child, a daughter.
As a god, she could have had
a thousand children.

We begin to see here
the deep violence of the earth

whose hostility suggests
she has no wish
to continue as a source of life.

And why is this hypothesis
never discussed? Because
it is not in the story; it only
creates the story.

In grief, after the daughter dies,
the mother wanders the earth.
She is preparing her case;
like a politician
she remembers everything and admits
nothing.

For example, her daughter’s
birth was unbearable, her beauty
was unbearable: she remembers this.
She remembers Persephone’s
innocence, her tenderness —

What is she planning, seeking her daughter?
She is issuing
a warning whose implicit message is:
what are you doing outside my body?

You ask yourself:
why is the mother’s body safe?

The answer is
this is the wrong question, since

the daughter’s body
doesn’t exist, except
as a branch of the mother’s body
that needs to be
reattached at any cost.

When a god grieves it means
destroying others (as in war)
while at the same time petitioning
to reverse agreements (as in war also):

if Zeus will get her back,
winter will end.

Winter will end, spring will return.
The small pestering breezes
that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers —

Spring will return, a dream
based on a falsehood:
that the dead return.

Persephone
was used to death. Now over and over
her mother hauls her out again —

You must ask yourself:
are the flowers real? If

Persephone “returns” there will be
one of two reasons:

either she was not dead or
she is being used
to support a fiction —

I think I can remember
being dead. Many times, in winter,
I approached Zeus. 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. show less