Louise Glück and the Power of Poetry
Appreciating an American Icon, One Year Later
Sad to see Louise Glück depart our puny planet, but glad she received the love and attention she richly deserved, and was able to feel that approbation while she was still around to enjoy it (something we don't do often enough with the geniuses who bless us with their gifts). I'll always be in her debt for being one of the first poets who held up that curious artistic torch and encouraged me (as only artists can do) to follow, learn, and start taking the work, and this world, a lot more seriously. This was 33 autumns ago.
1991: I had already encountered all the usual suspects (Poe in middle school, perhaps some Whitman or Dylan Thomas and possibly a Shakespeare sonnet or two in high school, then had my mind blown by A.E. Housman the way only an eighteen-year-old freshman can, then Dickinson and the Romantics (and what can approximate certain types of susceptible souls reading Keats and Shelley for the first time?), then, slowly growing older and easing into the 20th Century with a touch of T.S. Eliot and a dash of Wallace Stevens. A lot of anthologized poems, many of them rhymed, and most of them having the aesthetic of black and white footage: not quite clear or possibly too stark by half, more than a little antiquated, wisdom dispensed like a Sunday sermon: good for the soul, something for the mind to file away like a fat squirrel storing nuts for colder days in the future; all more or less understandable—this is how one becomes cultured, or at least used to be.
(Quick sidenote of appreciation for Dr. Karlson, a curmudgeon from the very old school who came to me as a sophomore—just when I needed him—and seemed like a septuagenarian but was probably “only” in his ‘60s, an unabashed advocate of meditation and guided visions through poems that he read s-l-o-w-l-y in his accent—Boston by way of the Byzantine Empire, the kind of crusader who wore turtlenecks and granny glasses (he was a poor man’s George Plimpton now that I think of it), who took his sweet time walking us through why Frost’s beloved if too-easily appreciated “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is a masterpiece of compressed metaphor, as only a professor of the older school could, equal parts preacher and dealer, wanting nothing more than to corrupt our polluted minds with some semblance of insight, tossing scattered seeds that might find nourishment somewhere in our beer-addled brains; humbling those of us who scoffed because this poem had been used to such mawkish effect in “The Outsiders,” a movie so saccharine and sentimental even an adolescent can see through it the way a gemologist detects fugazis; we didn’t yet understand, much less appreciate, that great art used in awful movies is both necessary and forgivable, serving as a useful gateway—they help preserve the works, but also nudge those who might not otherwise have the chance, providing some spark that could conflagrate in a subsequent obsession with creative expression.)
It wasn’t until my senior year poetry writing workshop that we caught up to current events and the ways they inspire poetry written by people who still walked amongst us, actual flesh and blood beings who happened to be geniuses. Of the many poems that invited me out onto the ledge to show me how vast, deep, and dark the world all around me actually was, the one I’ll always remember and acknowledge is “Mock Orange” by Louise Glück. This is the type of poem that serves last call for the ambivalent, a reminder that if you weren’t able to commit, it was best for everyone if you jumped off the train immediately, because it was only going to get scarier (i.e., better) from here.
I can’t say I understood it; I’m not even sure I enjoyed it. But it grabbed me by the collar the way certain works do (not coincidentally, this is the same semester I was beginning to grapple with jazz music, and to recall Ornette Coleman’s “Focus on Sanity” rattling around my dome as I read and re-read Glück’s poem is a reminder how fortunate I was, and that I may have still been in need of a translator, but I recognized an invitation when I received one).
Check it out:
“It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex”
Wait a minute: she hates flowers? And she hates sex? I thought poems were all about flowers and sex, and how beautiful both were? Well, only to a young reader who hasn’t read nearly enough poems or had nearly enough sex. This, then, is like finding a second bible and discovering how of course all this eternity babble is so much bullshit, and not only is there no afterlife, you’d better get busy figuring this one out, because it’ll all be over entirely too soon.
Or maybe that’s me, trying to remember what it felt like, barely of legal drinking age, yet old enough to enlist (or be drafted) if such things were either desirable or non-negotiable. But it was fall semester 1991, a fin de siècle time in America, and I was fortunate enough to concern myself with figuring out how words could mean exactly what they said, but somehow not mean anything that felt comfortable or familiar. And this is how a student learns how to read as a student, or even begins to read as a writer, as someone who will one day write things that might make sense in ways that only a select, extremely sensitive type of person will fathom.
“How can I be content
when there is still
that odor in the world?”
All I knew, as I toted my anthology of Modern American Poetry around campus, beginning to realize I had indeed found a second bible of sorts, was that once you read lines like this, if you are the type of person to whom they might have been addressed, nothing will ever be quite the same. You are, at first, frightened and, eventually, grateful.
**Let me know, via email or (preferably) in the comments, if there was a particular poem or song or artist—especially if you went on to become one yourself—who served as that initial, indelible influence. Inquiring minds want to know! XO