Louise Glück is Dead

The Wild Iris rests to be reborn

Louise Glück. “Glück HE” by Niklas Elmehed

Louise Glück, one of a quite literally dying breed of elite academic poets, died last week.

Here is her poem, The Wild Iris:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

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.

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 sea water.

---

Flowers, death, a great fountain, the sea.

Although I’ll confess I’ve never been a great admirer, I’ve always admired her work; Glück has always spoken my language.

Her lines can unduly fixate on the morbid and at times even veer dangerously close to prose. One can also often get the sense of the poet as an emotionally distant lover, which may well be the point at times. I suppose for some this can carry a certain charm.

When I was just starting out as a poet and grasping about for contemporary voices Glück was one of a handful who, to my stunted poetic sensibilities, seemed obviously like the real deal. You can hear her voice, and whether you like it or not, she speaks with an authority that only comes from years of suffering and craft.

Digging into her work and life this past week I came across an interview she gave in 2012, where she spoke of the time leading up to the writing of the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Wild Iris (1992).

I spent two years listening to Don Giovanni truly non-stop…and my only reading was flower catalogues; I was getting really passionate about the garden. And I was writing nothing. And I thought two years, two-and-a-half years. I thought, no wonder you can’t write anything. All you do is listen to Mozart and read about begonias. What do you expect?”

One day in her garden, she said, it just clicked. Except for five poems, the book was written in six weeks.

It was still Don Giovanni and the flower catalogues but all of sudden they’d fused into this form. But there was no sense building up to it of anything but a tragic falling off of original potential.

From a young age I’d had a strong awareness of death, so as a teenager lines like “It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth” not only sounded cool but seemed to me self-evident.

She recalls reading the poem The Little Black Boy as a child (“And we are put on earth a little space,/That we may learn to bear the beams of love”) and being moved by “the solitary voice raised in lament,” a phrase that captures much of her own lifelong project.

In the same interview she talks in religious tones of her encounter and then full immersion into psychoanalysis. Raised nominally Jewish, her poems flirt with the mystical and religious. Though for every sure-footed flurry of spirit-soaked affirmations there’s a line of tortuous questioning or a wallowing in agony which one often finds on the therapist’s couch.

A stanza from the poem The Drowned Children demonstrates a tendency to go too far and yet not far enough.

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.

---

I’ll save you the trouble; the rest of the poem offers no hope of redemption or earthly peace.

In recent years we’ve lost other pillars of American poetry’s now crumbling federation. John Ashbery (d. 2017) and Robert Bly (d. 2021) represented opposite ends of a spectrum that was held together by elite institutions which have rapidly lost cultural credibility.

Ashbery, a professor and master of craft, took the canon and put a Daffy Duck hat on it, cranking out poems that at once meant nothing and everything. Whereas Bly took upon himself the role of culture warrior activist and village troublemaker, using mythology and exotic foreign poetry in an attempt to enliven what he saw as a flattened culture. They both went to Harvard. Glück taught there.

To say we’re in the midst of a “tragic falling off of original potential” may be an overstatement. It may not be. Regardless, English-language poetry is undergoing a death, like much of our culture.

But is death the end?

In the above interview, prior to her Nobel Prize, Glück remarked that “I want to live after I die, in that ancient way. And there’s no knowing that will happen and there will be no knowing no matter how many blue ribbons I have plastered to my corpse.”

We’ll end with the final stanza from the Gluck poem, Afterword (2012).

Shall I be raised from death, the spirit asks.
And the sun says yes.
And the desert answers
your voice is sand scattered in wind.