Of these three reviews, the first two appeared in The Harvard Review, the third in Ploughshares.
Louise Glück, Vita Nova. Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1999.
ISBN 0-88001-634-5. $22.00 cloth.
Dante’s La Vita
Nuova is a sequence of lyrics with prose commentary dramatizing his early
love for Beatrice, an ideal figure of worldly and spiritual love. That a love affair could also be a drama of
self-discovery was not a new idea even in the middle ages, but Dante so
forcefully presented his “new life” as a complex emotional and religious
striving that no subsequent poet, whether borrowing his title or not, can use
the lyric to explore the difficulties of love and individuation without
invoking his work and all its associations.
Robert Lowell’s Day by Day is only one of the more recent poetic
sequences modeled roughly on Dante’s early masterpiece. Louise Glück, by nearly appropriating the
original title (offering its Latin version, to reinforce her classical stance),
insists that we keep Dante in mind as we read her psychologically demanding,
sometimes heartbreaking new book.
Glück’s
sequence, spoken by a middle-aged locutor, opens by looking back at relative
youth and finding deep irony in certain preoccupations of the younger self ,
particularly her obsession with time.
But she warns us, with the book’s epigraph (“The master said You must
write what you see. / But what I see does not move me. / The master
answered Change what you see.”), that this version of the younger self
is partly fictional, so it may be that the preoccupation with time is actually
that of the middle-aged speaker, who reinvents her younger self in order to
discover a continuum, if not a fate, that links the two. This reinvention of the self is among the
subjects of the book, as are the shriveling of the modern soul, the circularity
of experience, faithlessness, and self-irony as an impediment to love.
Glück’s method and
style would not be easy to imitate, though the elements are few and simple: a
flatly ironic tone, pervasive even in emotionally wrenching situations; free
verse frequently enjambed but rhythmically unchallenging; dramatic ellipsis,
placing the reader in the muddle of difficult situations; and a habit of
rethinking the psychology of character in terms of the narrative of myth. But this outline of her poetic does not begin
to convey the grave and pervasive intelligence of her work:
I
have been lifted and carried far away
into a luminous
city. Is this what having means,
to look down
on? Or is this dreaming still?
I was right,
wasn’t I, choosing
against the
ground? (“Condo”)
The risk of
Glück’s poems is their fearless embrace of direct statement, which sometimes
too readily invokes the commonplace insight, and sometimes leaches into the
poem more abstraction than it can bear.
She only infrequently grounds herself in specific places in the
world—one poem is entitled “Ellsworth Avenue,” and there are allusions to
several places in Cambridge, including the Broadway Market and Formaggio—but
these few references and the last line of the book, “Then I moved to Cambridge,”
suffice to link the internal world of dream, myth, and emotional trauma with
the familiar but equally haunting world of the senses. The risk pays off. Much of the power of her work derives from
her refusal of the usual material of the twentieth century poem—elaborate
imagery, complex rhetorical effects, geographical specificity, experimental
form—and her replacement of these devices with a narrow but highly focused
range of emotional invocations.
The
titles of the individual poems in this sequence indicate that Glück not only
revisits and revises her life but remakes a wide range of literary-historical
experience. This is the material to which poetry, in Glück’s aesthetic vision,
must always return. “The Queen of
Carthage,” “Roman Study,” “The Burning Heart,” “Orfeo,” “Eurydice,” “The Golden
Bough,” and “Inferno” embody the timeless quality of Glück’s concerns. “No one wants to be the muse; / in the end,
everyone wants to be Orpheus,” she remarks, underscoring the archetypal nature
of her own life, and, through intimate if sometimes oblique appeal to the
reader, our lives as well.
Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry by Louise
Glück. Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1994.
In
a note at the opening of this book, Louise Glück testifies to a respect for
scholarship learned from colleagues at Williams College, and modestly remarks
that her essays "participate in the scholar's inclination to
meditation," but "wholly lack the scholar's taste for
research." Certainly this book
reflects a poet's reading habits rather than a scholar's. The range of poetic understanding, however,
the insights into such major poets as Eliot, Keats, and Milton, the acute
comments on some of her contemporaries, and her ability to think through some
difficult "inexplicit terms"--"intimacy,"
"sincerity," "the forbidden"--demonstrate extraordinary
intelligence and a painstakingly cultivated critical sensibility.
Though
uneven in scope and unconnected as their genesis in discrete occasions
suggests, all of these essays offer distinct satisfactions. Not only do they serve as useful samples of
the sort of elegant simplicity we would expect of a poet of 's tonal severity
but they offer commentaries on their subjects worth any scholar's
attention. For example, on one of
Milton's later sonnets: "If blindness is, unlike death, a partial
sacrifice, it is hardly a propitiation: Milton's calm is not the calm of bought
time." Or on Eliot's idealism:
"Only through the closing of that gap between the actual and the ideal
could the physical world attain meaning, authority. But a mind sensitive to this discrepancy is
unlikely to experience a convincing union of these realms." Or on Frank Bidart's harrowing dramas:
"His art, like the story of the Garden, creates narratives designed to
account for what would otherwise be inexplicable suffering." Or on art in general: "There is,
unfortunately, no test for truth. That
is, in part, why artists suffer," and, from another essay, "It seems
to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished."
Some
of the essays are partly autobiographical, including "Education of the
Poet," "The Dream and the Watcher," and "On
Impoverishment." But the passages
in which Glück examines her own work are not as satisfying as those in which she
deals less personally with the problems and themes that haunt her. "The poem...must convince us of pain,
though its concerns lie elsewhere," she
says of Milton's "When I Consider How My Light is Spent,"
though we may think of her own "Metamorphosis" or "The
Reproach." Another example: in the
course of making some acute observations about the work of Linda McCarriston,
Carolyn Forch‚, Sharon Olds, and Frank Bidart, "The Forbidden" sheds
light on one of Glück’s primary themes.
The title of this essay, which appropriately begins by invoking the myth
of the Garden, defines an allure that many of Glück’s strongest poems explore,
including "Gretel in Darkness," "The Drowned Children,"
"The Garden," and all of The Wild Iris, in which what is most
forbidden, the direct approach to God, inflames a poetic of unusual visionary
candor. The rest of the essay, exploring
the strengths and failures of the poets under discussion, suggests why and how
Glück has devised so oblique and elusive an aesthetic, and with what purpose it
emphasizes the uncertainty rather than the sonority of her voice.
In
the closing essay, "On Impoverishment," a baccalaureate address
delivered at Williams College, Glück warns new graduates that they, like her,
like everyone, will suffer, but counsels them to find the meaning, the
"yield" of that suffering. Impoverishment,
silence, loss, suffering of all kinds help define us; we mustn't flee from
them, she argues, but face and resist them.
Nothing better describes her poetry: facing, acknowledging, resisting
and through that resistance certifying despair as an authentic moment of
humanness, not to be refused. The
artist's task is to chart these moments of humanness, in which fortitude
exceeds itself and becomes a kind of joy.
This distinct if disconcerting pleasure shines through all of Louise
Glück’s work, poems and essays alike.
Review of Descending Figure
Much contemporary poetry
attempts to charge a landscape with the imaginative self through an allegorical
and mythological vision. While poetry of the past tends to place the self in a
landscape where it perceives and reacts, our contemporaries frankly reverse the
process and locate the landscape in the psyche. This extends what Roy Harvey
Pearce has described as the Adamic vision of American poetry; but the tone now
is detached and otherworldly, touched by Surrealism. The old dualism of the I
and the Not-I remains unresolved; but however obsessed with that Romantic
dilemma, our younger poets anchor both elements in the myth-making imagination,
as Jung replaces Christ as the cartographer of the unregenerate soul.
Louise Glück's poems remind
us that mythmaking is closely related to allegory even when the "thing
itself" retains its integrity. The most ambitious poem in her new book (Descending Figure, Ecco Press, $9.95) is a sequence entitled "The
Garden." It models both a mind and a culture and renews an old
myth through an imitation of the creative process itself. Glück's bleak imagery
presents a set of possibilities that voice and metaphor resolve into a gray and
Barbizon School merging of self and landscape. The first part of the sequence is
a complex restatement of Genesis:
. . .the hiss and whirr
of houses gliding into their places.
And the wind
leafs through the bodies of animals.
The sequence ends with a poem
entitled "The Fear of Burial": "the body waits to be
claimed./The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock." This is a rich
metaphor of the history and failure of Christian dualism, which ties the
Romantic and modern existential angst to the ages. The poem then ends with a
metaphor that aptly mythologizes the necessities of physical life and evokes
once again the failure of the Christian ideal of redemption through virtue and
austerity.
How far away they seem,
the wooden doors, the bread and milk
laid like weights on the table.
The sequence is a miracle of
compression, a tight allegory composed of complex metaphors that evoke both the
Biblical creation myth and the modern myth of self-creation. It is a
"model of the mind" in that it replicates the overlays of association
with which the mind works; yet is aesthetically uncompromising in its reliance
on straightforward imagery. It is a poem that reminds us that "no ideas
but in things" does not mean "no ideas," but is a challenge for
us to discover resonances of the physical world in secret rooms of the psyche.
Glück has found these rooms
to be filled with language, as a monk's secret rooms might be filled with God.
Poetry is not religion, but it is salvation, sometimes:
The
word
is
bear: you give and give, you empty
yourself into a child. And you survive
the automatic loss.
("Autumnal")
Glück's aesthetic is grounded
in her imaginatively-apprehended landscapes, but her ultimate faith is in the
power of the creative mind to resolve the isolation of the self from the
external world through language.
This topographical aesthetic
contains a certain danger aggravated by the influence of Surrealism. If the
poet presents us with a purely imaginative landscape he or she may
sentimentally underscore the isolation of the individual, and trigger the
bathos of solipsism that Wallace Stevens took such trouble to avoid. Rather, we
need redeemed landscapes, in which the imaginative self is a concrete presence
that infuses our vision of our culture with a viable symbolic content.
Allegory, the model of the mind, is not here a set of simple signs: it is the
affirmation that the poet and the reader might understand the world through
this exploration of the self and language. Resorting to evocation instead of
infusion leaves us with imaginary gardens inhabited only by imaginary toads.
