Louise Glück, The Art of Poetry No. 115

Louise Glück

 
Louise Glück, The Art of Poetry No. 115
Interviewed by Henri Cole
Issue 246, Winter 2023



Tucson, Arizona, 1978. photograph by Lois Shelton, © Arizona Board of Regents, courtesy of the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

In early March of 2021, Louise Glück visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID, she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years, she rented a house during the winters. She packed pumpernickel bagels, apples, and cheese for our six-hour road trip, and she brought CDs of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, and the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian master of the modern chanson. Long ago Glück and her former husband had listened to operas on road trips, but this was her first car trip in many years. She knew the musical works backward and forward, pointing out Maria Callas’s vocal strengths and clapping her hands while singing along with Brel. The magnificent almond orchards of central California had just begun to blossom and gleam beside the rolling highway. At the farmers’ market in Claremont, she bought nasturtiums and two baskets of strawberries while talking openly about her girlhood and how she’d weighed only seventy pounds at the worst moment of her anorexia. “But you love food, like a gourmand, Louise,” I said, and she replied, “All anorexics love food.” The hotel where she was staying seemed dingy, but she did not complain. Sitting on the bed cover, she propped herself up with pillows and responded to the endless emails arriving on her mobile phone.

Some months earlier, Glück had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. When the Swedish Academy phoned her quite early in the morning with the marvelous news, she was told that she had twenty-five minutes before the world would know. She immediately called her son, Noah, on the West Coast, and he was joyful after overcoming his panic at hearing the phone ring in the night. Then she called her dearest friend, Kathryn Davis, and her beloved editor, Jonathan Galassi. Reporters quickly appeared on her little dead-end street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon she was exhausted from replying to the journalists’ questions, like “Why do you write so frequently about death?” Because of the lockdown, her Nobel medal was presented in the backyard of her condominium. Gray clouds blocked the sun. A light snow and frost covered the yard. The wind gusted. A small folding table was set up in the grass with an ivory cloth that made the gold medal shimmer. I watched the ceremony from Glück’s back patio, on the second floor. She wore black boots, black slacks, a black blouse, a black leather coat with big shearling lapels, and fingerless gloves. A cameraman asked her several times to pick up her medal, and she obeyed, as the wind blew her freshly cut hair across her face. The Swedish consul general explained that normally Glück would have received her medal from the king of Sweden, but that she was standing in for him. The consulate had sent a large bouquet of white amaryllis, but Glück thought they looked wrong in the austere winter scene, so they were removed from the little table. The ceremony took no longer than five minutes, and she shivered silently until she finally asked if she could go inside to warm up.

From the beginning, Glück cited the influence of Blake, Keats, Yeats, and Eliot—poets whose work “craves a listener.” For her, a poem is like a message in a shell held to an ear, confidentially communicating some universal experience: adolescent struggles, marital love, widowhood, separation, the stasis of middle age, aging, and death. There is a porous barrier between the states of life and death and between body and soul. Her signature style, which includes demotic language and a hypnotic pace of utterance, has captured the attention of generations of poets, as it did mine as a nascent poet of twenty-two. In her oeuvre, the poem of language never eclipses the poem of emotion. Like the great poets she admired, she is absorbed by “time which breeds loss, desire, the world’s beauty.”

The conversations that make up this interview mostly took place during the days of Glück’s visit two years ago, which included a rooftop seminar—with the San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop—and a standing-room-only reading at the Marion Minor Cook Athenaeum, during which she dined with students, an experience that evidently gave her pleasure. She had no desire to undertake a cradle-to-grave interview, but she was happy to converse about her new book, teaching, and craft, and read the version of the interview that I sent her as a work in progress. After her unexpected death on Friday, October 13, 2023, I shared our pages with the Review, since there would be no further conversations.

 


INTERVIEWER

Am I correct in thinking that you write two kinds of books—one a collection of disparate lyric poems and another that has some of the characteristics of prose, with a narrative thread?

GLÜCK

Yes, and I seem to rotate between the modes. I also think of my books as either operating on a vertical axis, from despair to transcendence, or moving horizontally, with concerns that are more social or communal, the sort of material you might expect to show up in a novel rather than a poem. Averno (2006), for instance, is a book quintessentially on a vertical axis. And A Village Life (2009) is utterly the opposite—with different speakers coming from different times of life, living in some unspecified little seemingly Mediterranean village, though the model was Plainfield, Vermont, where I lived for many years. You make substitutions to keep yourself inventing.

 

undefinedcourtesy of the Louise Glück Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

 

INTERVIEWER

In your books that move from despair to transcendence, does the divine play a role?

GLÜCK

You could say that the divine is usually at the upper region of the vertical-axis books. In the dark lower region is human flailing—without the divine. Because I’m not a religious person, I would not use this word, divine. But I do think that there is the sense, in the upper regions, of having somehow been rescued and, at the bottom, a sense of having been abandoned.

INTERVIEWER

Where did this idea of a book as one whole thing come from?

GLÜCK

I thought about books that way from the beginning. I was writing short poems, but I wanted to build environments. I wanted to suggest an atmosphere as opposed to a subject or agenda, a meditation or quest as opposed to a stance. Of course, in the early books this isn’t obvious, though I gave great thought to the order of the poems and their implicit arc or trajectory. This attitude became more obvious in Ararat (1990). I remember that when I wrote the first poem—with all flat declarative sentences, no figurative language, no images—I thought the only way it could possibly work was as a whole book, meaning that the flat language had to have, behind and around it, a world.

INTERVIEWER

What about Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014)?

GLÜCK

The adventure of Faithful and Virtuous Night, which moves along a horizontal axis, was twofold. First, writing a very, very long poem, which has to do with—I always deplore this as a subject matter—art and the making of art, though the speaker begins as a baby, and I think this gives it a certain kind of originality. The other thing I discovered was the prose poem. I had never understood it as a form until I read Mark Strand’s Almost Invisible, which galvanized me. I thought his were the most amazing prose poems I had read in a long time, which didn’t suggest that I would be able to write them myself. My book was almost done, but it felt leaden, and it needed something else. A close friend said, “Why don’t you read Kafka’s short shorts, which are like prose poems?” I had read Kafka’s short shorts, but I follow advice when it’s given by someone I have high respect for. And when I read them again, I thought, Oh, I don’t think these are that good—I could do this. So I did, and it was so much fun. And then for a while I forgot how to write lines, so that was its own little calamity …

INTERVIEWER

Would you say more about your friends and how they influence your work?

GLÜCK

Most of my books are dedicated to my friends. My friends are the center of my life. They are crucial. I change my life to be sure that I see them. They’re all quite different people. I would be impoverished without them. Recently, I bought a small house in Vermont, where my oldest friends still are. My dearest friend now lives two minutes away. For a very long time, I lived in Cambridge and showed her everything I wrote though she lived elsewhere, but now another form of the friendship has been resumed, and it seems that it was waiting to be resumed at any time when it could be. My friendships with people in different cities seem to be like that. There can be a distance in time and also a geographical distance, but when I see them again, it’s as though no time has passed. I mean, much time has passed, many things have changed, but you resume the conversation about what’s going on in the same way as before. And that is the most extraordinary ongoing fact of my life.

INTERVIEWER

“Winter Recipes from the Collective,” the title poem of your recent book, makes me wonder whether you ever lived in a collective or ashram or commune. Also, did you write the sections of this long poem in the order in which they appear?

GLÜCK

I’ve never lived in a collective or ashram or commune. Plainfield was the closest—severe weather would turn the village into something like a collective, in that there was a great deal of pooling of resources and watching over the needs of others and cooperating to survive the ordeal of the very long winters, scarily less long now. Everything in the poem is made-up—the collective, the moss-collecting and fermenting, the bonsai cultivation, and the Chinese master. The sections were written at long intervals, with other things in between, over probably a few years of not writing much. The first section was definitely first.

INTERVIEWER

Do you write every day? Are your poems written long after lived experience?

GLÜCK

I don’t have a regular writing protocol or schedule. I’ve found that too anxiety-producing, because there were so many days I sat in front of the typewriter and a piece of white paper and wrote nothing. It was an annihilating experience. So I write when I begin to have phrases in my head—I jot them down, and then, after a while, I go to the typewriter.

I don’t think I write through transition periods. What happens to me is that something stops, something ends, something is brought to a closure. Then I have nothing—I’ve used up whatever it is that I had and must wait for the well to fill up again. That’s what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t feel like a sanguine experience of sitting quietly while the well fills up. It seems like an experience of desolation, loss, even a kind of panic. The thing you would wish to be doing, you can’t do. I’ve been through a lot of those periods, and what seems to happen, or what has happened in the past, is that after a year or two, or whatever the duration, another sound emerges—and it really is another sound. It’s another way of thinking about a poem or making a poem, a different kind of speech to use, from the Delphic to the demotic. Suddenly I’ll hear a line—you can’t hear this yourself when I read, because my voice tends to pasteurize everything—suddenly I’ll realize that I’m being sent some sort of message, a new path, and I try it on. That’s how things change for me—it’s never that I work my way through it. I have friends, great poets, who seem to make extraordinary use of a daily ritualized writing practice, but for me that doesn’t work at all.

INTERVIEWER

May I ask about “Song,” the beautiful closing poem in Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021)? Is the “you” in the poem you, Louise?

GLÜCK

No. The “you” changes in this book—sometimes the you is a sister, a friend, a companion, a person who is on the journey with the speaker. The you in “Song” is slightly different from the friend-companion-sister figure—this is you, the reader, or whoever is listening to me. In the dream that was the basis for the poem, I think the you was a good friend of mine. We had been talking about ceramics. I love ceramics.

INTERVIEWER

In your dream, was the ceramist really named Leo Cruz?

GLÜCK

Yes, and I don’t know anyone by that name. I don’t know anyone named Leo, and I don’t know anyone named Cruz, so it was an invention. That’s what I liked about the line. You couldn’t find him. He’s not in the world. I mean, there may be forty-five hundred of them, but this one who makes porcelain in the desert, he’s not there. He’s part of a dream. He stands for the fact that something in the desert is alive.

INTERVIEWER

The imagination?

GLÜCK

Yeah.

 

undefinedcourtesy of the Louise Glück Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

INTERVIEWER

What is it about ceramics that you love?

GLÜCK

I like objects that have utility. I like beautiful things that have a use. I’m a very domestic person. I like to cook, so I like table service, which inevitably leads to ceramics of some kind. I also like flower vases and objects that have no use, but mainly it’s the combination of beauty and usefulness. Also, I love old Japanese ceramics. The idea that something valuable is fragile is also attractive to me.

When I first moved to Vermont, in my late twenties, a long time ago, Goddard College was flourishing. I had a one-semester appointment—that’s why I moved there—and it was my first job teaching a poetry workshop. Goddard had a naked dorm and the class was held there, which didn’t mean my students were naked, but that the students who lived there were. When my class met, we would keep our clothes on, but it was weird to see these naked bodies going back and forth, not all of them fabulously beautiful, I might add, though they were all young. A lot of interesting people in that period were making remarkable ceramic art, and there was a great teacher, so I would hang out at the pottery studio, and I learned how to use the wheel—not expertly, but I loved sitting at the wheel and feeling the clay. I loved the way you would hold your hands steady and a shape would form. I especially loved doing raku. Do you know what raku is?

INTERVIEWER

Does it have a crackly glaze?

GLÜCK

You use a certain kind of glazing that’s more porous than normal glazes. When you pull the pot out of the kiln, you might throw it outside onto something that will affect the way the glaze plays on and imprints the object. There is a feeling of randomness. It was so exciting to pull this hot thing out of the kiln and walk outside and throw it into the snow. Then you’d have to find it. Sometimes they were horrible-looking—little gaseous-looking lumps. But it was always fun, and sometimes they were quite beautiful. I mean other people’s were quite beautiful—mine were rarely beautiful. I did keep one somewhere, or I tried to keep one.

INTERVIEWER

Do you prefer to write from your dreams and unconscious, as you do in “Song,” or to make things up? How do you choose?

GLÜCK

It’s not choose. Something presents itself and you have an instinct for what you can use, the way a bird building a nest knows, Oh, I need a little piece of red ribbon there, and then goes out searching for red ribbon, or the bird might not know that but see the red ribbon and think, Hmm, that has my name on it. You use what you come across, and you come across your dreams with regularity. I don’t sit at my desk and think, Now I will use something from my recent dream. It’s more like I wake up with a line and I write it down and I look at it, and it’s mysterious because the dream is mysterious—I don’t know what it means. Then I invent a context for it. Or I fail.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a relationship between emotional truth and narrative fact in your poems? I’m thinking about your use of fable and dream versus autobiographical content.

GLÜCK

Oh, I don’t think of that as truth but as literal occurrence. Truth, to me, is that which lives within experience. Sometimes you’re working from things that have happened to you in life, but you realize that it would have more force if someone other than you were speaking. Exactly transcribed lived experience will not always make the best poem possible, partly because your conclusions about what you’ve already lived are made before you start writing. What you want to have happen is that on the page you discover something. That’s when the electricity comes, so you invent stories in order to come upon discoveries, insights you haven’t yet had. That’s what I believe in.

INTERVIEWER

In many of your poems, there’s a master and a disciple, the teacher who is knowledgeable and the poet who is seeking knowledge. Does this model come to you from some source?

GLÜCK

I owe a great deal to the people who taught me, starting in grade school. I often didn’t get on well with my peers, but invariably I got along with my teachers. I wanted to learn, so I was easy to teach. I wasn’t docile, but I wasn’t, in any way that they could discern, rebellious. For me, the relationship of the apprentice and the master has always been charged, because there’s a kind of reciprocity. It’s not simply the master passing down that which he knows and the student bowing and thanking. There’s a transaction. The younger person is reminding the older one of the early ferocity of their vocation. The older person is a representative of stubbornness and persistence and sometimes a kind of majestic fatigue. There are a million permutations of this relationship, but they are, all of them, interesting to me. Now I’ve been in both roles. And I’ve been a teacher for God knows how many decades …

INTERVIEWER

One thing I find moving in Winter Recipes is how you, an accomplished poet at the top of her profession, remain a seeker.

GLÜCK

Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. That role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing. I mean, to be seventy-eight years old and still looking, looking—this amazes me.

INTERVIEWER

It amazes me, too.

GLÜCK

I’m very glad of it, because otherwise I’d be either despondent or complacent or both. I hang on to that because it’s a sort of lifeline.

 

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courtesy of the estate of Louise Glück and Poetry magazine.

INTERVIEWER

Would you talk about the role of gardening in your life?

GLÜCK

I don’t garden a lot anymore, but I love plants, and I’ve loved plants my whole life. I didn’t come from a family of gardeners, I came from a family of appreciators—people who loved flowers, and, as it happened, food. When I was in my late teens and was still living at home, I asked my mother if I could have a piece of our backyard. I started growing produce and I was very successful. It was very good dirt. This was Long Island, so there was nice sunlight. Later, when I moved to Vermont, I started gardening because I cook. There were a lot of things you couldn’t find in that period at the store, so my husband and I had a garden, though it’s true the summers were very short, because I wanted arugula, beautiful lettuces, and herbs. We had a terrific house with a lot of land and both of us really got bitten by the bug and started growing vegetables, then branched out into flowers.

I became quite obsessed. There was a period of two years when I read nothing but gardening catalogues. I really thought my life as a poet was over. Then I wrote The Wild Iris (1992), a book in which flowers speak. I could see that a lot of the prose from the catalogues came into the poems. One of the things I feel most strongly—and that book taught it to me—is that you have to allow yourself your obsessions. You can’t decide they’re not literary enough, or not elevated enough. I mean, it’s not that I had given myself permission to read the catalogues, but it was all I could put my mind to. I realized subsequently that this was the catalyst for a book that seemed to me at the time the best thing I’d written—it doesn’t now, but it did then.

Lately, I’ve been watching a whole lot of television, and I’m sure it will get into my work—maybe not the fact of its being television, or maybe that too, I don’t know, but the point is that I don’t feel I have a choice. You must trust that impulse in yourself, because your work is going to come out of what absorbs you. Your work is not going to come out of things you decide should absorb you.

INTERVIEWER

What are you watching on television?

GLÜCK

Ozark. I think Julia Garner is great, I like all the actors, but the show is a little warmed-over, and the characters are always doing things that those characters wouldn’t really do, so I’m between enthusiasms. The last thing I really loved was Schitt’s Creek, which I watched three times in a row. I thought it was the great COVID television show, because there’s this heroic survival. It’s comic, but it’s also so moving—that kind of bravery and withstanding of terrible changes of circumstance. I tried to watch something else, but really all I wanted was Schitt’s Creek. I think I stopped because I had it memorized—I knew how all the speeches go.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe it will be revived for another season.

GLÜCK

I don’t think so. They’ll do something else. It’s a Canadian ensemble.

INTERVIEWER

Can you say more about your particular curiosities as a seeker?

GLÜCK

It’s not so much a literary curiosity—it’s more a kind of human curiosity. If I meet someone, I want to know a lot about them right away. What I don’t have is curiosity about places. I hate travel because I depend on ritual. I need to have a lot of repetition in my daily life if I’m going to do the things I need to do. I always feel that, when you finish something, you’ve been emptied of it, and if you don’t have another thing on the fire—and I’m always working on just one thing—then you’re empty, but you remember what it was like not to be empty, so you want not to be empty anymore. Some people look inward for that, but I’ve found that my inward store is a little limited, so I’ve trusted the world to give me something that I can respond to. It’s the same with teaching. I always feel that I have nothing to say until I get into a classroom and then someone says something, and I’m full of either a passionate agreement or a mild disagreement. But I think responsively, dialectically. That’s what I mean by seeking.

INTERVIEWER

This dialectical thinking is a signature of your work.

GLÜCK

Yes, for a long time this has been true.

 

undefinedWith her son, Noah, at home in Plainfield, Vermont, ca. 1975. courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

INTERVIEWER

There is certainly colloquy in “The Denial of Death,” which I see as a poem about motion and growth. Is that narrative made up, too, or is it a dream poem? Are you the woman who has lost her passport and is sleeping under the orange trees? Did you have someone in mind as the concierge figure, who is also a kind of master?

GLÜCK

I also think of it as a poem of motion, the inexorable motion of time and the motion of going nowhere—you can go in circles but still change, because the unmoving takes place in time, which is all change and transience. The “I” isn’t Louise. I see the figures as two men. To my mind it’s an entirely gay poem—the lover at the beginning is male, too. I have no idea how anyone would know this, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Somehow, the sort of off-center quality of gay life seemed to me the world here. There is no concierge figure in my life, though I have wise friends.  

INTERVIEWER

You once said to me that, when you wrote “Song,” you knew that you had a book rather than a pile of papers. What about the poem brought the book into shape?

GLÜCK

Before writing “Song,” I’d written a cluster of lyric poems that seemed unrelated to one another and yet also the same. How could they be unrelated and the same? They all occupied the same slot, and this seemed boring to me. The poems were filled with sorrow and despair—sometimes ironic. My very much-loved sister had died, and so Winter Recipes is a book of mourning, principally, that coincided with COVID, which became a sort of gigantic mourning for all of us—for the lives we used to have, didn’t have, don’t have. Then I felt a new thread emerging, in a way starting with “Presidents’ Day.” “Song” seemed just like wings. I think that’s why I found I couldn’t punctuate the finish—because there was so much air in it, so much soaring above the emergency. I right away knew that it would be the last poem in the book. You certainly wouldn’t want to start with that and then spiral down. I mean, you might, but it would be a very different book. I read it as a book about attachment and the triumph of survival—not triumph as in, We trudged up a mountain and we’re still alive even though our feet are bleeding, but more so the idea that to continue to exist after enduring terrible things—to continue to exist is to continue to have hope, and hope seemed to me suddenly the most extraordinary human accomplishment. We’re fond of talking about how dumb it is, because it’s so often out of sync with the evidence, but it seems to me actually crucial to human survival, even if it’s illusory. Even if Leo Cruz never existed, and there are no bowls to be had, and no kiln fires burning, to hope is still a very great thing.

INTERVIEWER

“Presidents’ Day” ends with two short lines, “Joyful—now there’s a word / we haven’t used in a while.” I like the offhanded uplift. Did you feel joy when you wrote them?

GLÜCK

Well, I don’t know that I felt that way when I was writing—in the driveway of the house in Berkeley, as a matter of fact, in February 2020. I rarely actually feel what a line says. I get interested in the words, which seem to come from nowhere—possibly from what I feel or from what seems to be in the air or from something in a movie.

INTERVIEWER

May I also ask about the first poem in Winter Recipes titled simply “Poem”? Why did you give it that title?

GLÜCK

I couldn’t think of anything better.

INTERVIEWER

Who is the “you” the speaker comforts in “Poem”? Were you thinking of your sister? And did your mother sing to you when you were a child?

GLÜCK

Yes, it’s my sister—as I say, Winter Recipes is a book of mourning. My mother had a good voice and, to my violent embarrassment, she used to sing torch songs at my parents’ parties—she was a performer—but she didn’t sing to us, or not that I remember. Also, I wouldn’t have liked it.

INTERVIEWER

Are you the little boy?

GLÜCK

I am more the boy than the girl here—the responsible, dominant figure. The boy and the girl are impervious immortal figures. Day and night on the cuckoo clock.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read poetry when you were a little girl?

GLÜCK

What’s odd in your question is the phrase “little girl.” I didn’t feel like a little girl—I would guess this to be a common feeling. I understood that I was perceived as one. I was certainly not a little boy. But I felt like a single, unprecedented thing, a mind, like the light a miner wears on their head. Adolescence, when it happened, was a shock. Suddenly I was inescapably confined by gender—I rejected this tacitly and also violently.

When I was very young, I read the songs from Shakespeare’s plays and also Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Both were in tiny—that is, physically small—books I believe I found at my grandmother’s house, where my sister and I, and our four cousins, spent a great deal of time. This memory might be inaccurate—my grandmother was not a reader. But I know I felt instantly that these voices were of my tribe and these poets the people I aspired to speak to.   

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about your poetry writing teachers.

GLÜCK

I went to the General Studies writing program at Columbia University, night school. In night school, you get quite an assortment of people—some of them gifted, and some not at all. My first teacher there was a poet named Léonie Adams, a very, very erudite woman. I didn’t like her poems, but she knew a great deal, and she was a good reader. She could read poems that were different from her own and was wise about them and helpful. I studied with her for two years. Léonie would bring in poems by the young writers she thought we should pay attention to. One day she brought in a poem that she absolutely deplored and read it to us. It was by James Wright, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. I realized then that Léonie and I had parted ways, because I didn’t want to study with someone who thought that poem was terrible—I wanted to write poems that sounded like that. I then studied with Stanley Kunitz for several years at General Studies. The M.F.A. writing program at Columbia was just starting up then, and Stanley said that I could join as a special student, even though I didn’t have a college degree. He taught an attitude of service to the poem. If you brought in something that had lots of good lines and one bad one, he didn’t say, Wonderful work, now go write another. He would look at the poem and say, This doesn’t work, and he would characterize the weak spot. He would point to the line that I secretly knew was a fingers-crossed attempt at a line, and I always agreed with him. I would revise and show him the new draft, and there would be something amiss, so I would revise again. I learned a kind of patience from him—that you couldn’t force the poem, you couldn’t just tell it to be right and have it be right. I was willing to do the things he suggested, and that lasted for quite a while.

I also studied for one semester with Adrienne Rich, who was just becoming politically outspoken. She wasn’t yet known to be gay. She was at that moment repudiating her Radcliffe education, so her way of teaching a workshop was for us all to sit around a table and read our poems, and she would either say “I dig it” or “I don’t dig it.” That was it. I wasn’t writing very well, or much, but I felt she was cheating us. She had had a careful education, and she had a honed, precise mind, which she at that moment deplored, so she wasn’t allowing us access to it, because she didn’t want to be the representative of that tradition. But “I dig it” was not useful, and a lot of the poems she dug were not great—I mean, they could have been much better. That’s not to say they should have been more bookish, just that they could have been more powerfully what they were trying to be. I mean I got nothing from that, and I felt completely outside the class. I did form one friendship that was important, with a writer named Hugh Seidman, whose first book I continue to think is one of the great books published by anyone of my generation, Collecting Evidence—it was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets many, many years ago. I learned a lot from it.


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courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

INTERVIEWER

How do you make the judgment that Collecting Evidence is great?

GLÜCK

It’s difficult to respond in the abstract—I’d have to have his book in front of me and be able to show you a poem and say, Look at this! But Collecting Evidence is a book that is hugely ambitious, and, line by line, mesmerizingly beautiful and also profoundly intelligent. Always Seidman’s mind is going somewhere my mind didn’t. Every line surprises me, and the shapes he makes of the whole I think are unbelievable, so passionate and full of a kind of youthful despair that feels like it comes from a very old mind, even though he was a kid when he wrote it. In my view, Seidman never wrote a book that approached the greatness of his first. It is very hard, as a writer, if your first book is monumental, because that first book never receives a lot of attention. Instead, attention is paid to lesser subsequent works, so the reputation doesn’t develop.

INTERVIEWER

What did Rich make of your work at the time?

GLÜCK

She thought I was a little bourgeois—I was young, but I was married, and I had a first book that was rather formal. I once showed her a poem in her office, and she had nothing to say about it. Then I showed it to someone else, who gave me some very good criticism, and I reworked it and showed it to her again. “You made it better,” she said to me, and I thought, No thanks to you. We came to respect and like each other, much, much later in life, but she was an awful teacher.

INTERVIEWER

Of course I’m curious how you approach your own classes.

GLÜCK

We discuss, in depth, three poems in two hours. I teach undergrads, mostly. They read a book a week that they choose from a master list I provide. If I think they’re reading the wrong poets for who they are, I’ll say, “Why don’t you try this?” They have to write a critical response to what they’re reading, and I watch to see how their work is changing, and I do a lot of conferences. The poems that aren’t discussed are annotated, too, so everybody every week gets detailed feedback. I like to get, in the conversation, beyond the early diagnostic stuff. If a workshop is going to be useful, you don’t just say what’s wrong—you have to think in terms of alternative strategies the poet can use to reenter the poem and approach the weak places. The focus is in trying to think about the reasons why something falters or seems conventional—I might say, “I’ve seen this before, and the poem goes dead here.” Then you have to figure out why it goes dead and what would make it not dead. Sometimes you can see certain syntactical possibilities, like shifting the syntax so that instead of a conjunction you have a preposition, or you put a semicolon where a period is, and you oblige the sentence to continue. Always, one thing to do, if you’re stuck, is to ask a question in the poem. A question shifts the mechanism of the poem.

INTERVIEWER

Is it difficult for you to evaluate your own work? How do you decide when a revision is done?

GLÜCK

I show drafts to other people—not a lot of people, but a few. I sometimes show them things I’m stuck on. I try and get them a complete draft, but often I’m aware that the poem is not as good as I hoped it would be. Usually by the time I show it to someone, I’m at the end of the line—I have thought of everything I can think of, and the thing still isn’t right. A friend will say, “Here’s where the trouble is,” even though I was thinking that the trouble was somewhere else. Or they’ll say it goes on too long and show me a place to cut, or maybe it doesn’t go on long enough. If I’m in agreement—if what I’m hearing makes sense—then I try to revise. If someone can say, Rewrite that sentence, or, You need another stanza in there, I try to do it.

Sometimes, if my style is changing, I really have no idea whether I’m writing brilliantly or appallingly. All my critical capabilities are geared toward a certain kind, or variety of kinds, of poem. If I start to write a different kind of poem, I have no critical apparatus—I either need someone to affirm it or move on to the next thing. It’s like parenting, how you get to a place with a baby—it’s ten months old, and you finally know how to be the mother or the father of a ten-month-old baby, and then all of a sudden the baby is two, and you are completely without skills. But after a while, you learn certain things. Sometimes I have been oversold on my poems—you always want everything you write to be great, and until you show a poem to someone, you might have twenty-four hours of thinking that it is, though that feeling diminishes over the twenty-four-hour period. But I do usually know when something comes out really well, though it’s rare that I think something is perfect when I finish it. I usually think, Ah, that line could be better. Or, Something’s wrong here.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find it more difficult to revise a poem, like “Song,” that originated in the unconscious?

GLÜCK

I can tell you the stanza that gave me trouble. First I jotted down roughly the opening stanza, “Leo Cruz makes the most beautiful white bowls; / I think I must get some to you / but how is the question / in these times . . .” And then the second, “He is teaching me / the names of the desert grasses; / I have a book / since to see the grasses is impossible.” It was pretty fast. Then I didn’t know quite what to do. The stanza that begins “We make plans / to walk the trails together”—I didn’t have that. I knew the poem was going to be too brisk if I didn’t have the right thing there, and I had a couple of bad ideas and probably quite a few bad stanzas. It took a while. I don’t know whether I had the “never again” part—“We make plans / to walk the trails together. / When, I ask him, / when? Never again: / that is what we do not say”—but I certainly didn’t have “We make plans to walk the trails together.”

 

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From left, Glück, Daniel Halpern, and Mark Strand at the Library of Congress, 1990. courtesy of the Library of Congress and the Academy of American Poets, poets.org.

INTERVIEWER

There are many commas and semicolons in the poem but, at the ends of several stanzas and at the finish, no periods. Is the reason to suggest hope?

GLÜCK

All I knew—I mean, I’m providing a rationalization for an intense feeling—is that I looked at it more punctuated and it looked all wrong, and then I thought, Well, maybe I’ll just use dashes, which don’t feel like punctuation, but then there were too many of them, and it looked too perky. But it was odd for me to decide on that, because I like punctuation.

 

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With Henri Cole, 2010. © Nancy Crampton.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel a pressure to explain your poems?

GLÜCK

No. I’ve done what I know how to do. Then people opine. You may not like what they say, even if they affirm what you do. You may read what they say and think, If that’s the poem I wrote, I would like to jump off a roof, because even though they’re praising it, you’re horrified at what they think you wrote—you’re not horrified that they said it, you’re horrified that it might be true, because how would you know? It’s not hard to tap into that desperation and anxiety, but I do think that, once you put something in a book or on a page, your right to comment on it is gone. The poem contains your comments—it appears in a book with your certification, and your approval. There’s nothing for you to add. I tell my students, who believe passionately in explaining the work they’re sharing, “You know, when you’re dead, you can’t go around explaining this thing—it has to be right there on the page.” It’s like scoring a piece of music. You have to get it right so that a conductor who doesn’t know you and musicians who have never seen this composition before will be playing the piece of music that you wrote when they follow your instructions. You want a poem to register in every mind the way it did in yours. Then you discover this never happens. Still, it is what you strive for. You try to make a version of it as incapable of being mutilated as possible.

INTERVIEWER

Has writing become more stressful now that your books are translated into many languages? Do you ever think about that?

GLÜCK

No, because I can’t read the languages. I mean, I hope some of the translations will be good, but they’re not going to be my books. For instance, how could you translate the title Faithful and Virtuous Night? It’s a pun, and the whole large poem that controls the book is based on puns. “Neigh, neigh said my heart, / or perhaps nay, nay—it was hard to know”—you can’t translate that from English, so I don’t know what happens to these poor poems in German, French, or Italian.

INTERVIEWER

Would you prefer a world that didn’t ask poets to rationalize their work?

GLÜCK

What did I say that suggested I feel I have to rationalize things?

INTERVIEWER

Well, I asked for a rationalization of the absence of periods at the ends of stanzas in “Song.”

GLÜCK

I do know what I think the ambience of each of my books is, and I know what I feel their themes are, their concerns, the problems they’re examining. I don’t think of that as rationalizing—I think of it as analytic work. I’m aware that my view may be in some way blind, that there may be things that I don’t see and would be alarmed to discover. After I write a poem, I also consider it as a reader. When you’re working on a poem, you’re simultaneously immersed in it and detached from it—stepping back from it, regarding it, thinking about its lacks, the places where it’s murky without wanting to be, so there are always two people working on a poem, the writer and the reader.


undefinedGlück, at left, at her Nobel ceremony in the backyard of her Cambridge apartment building, 2020. courtesy of Henri Cole.

INTERVIEWER

So I shouldn’t ask you for a manifesto on how we should read your poems?

GLÜCK

No. As I say, whatever I want should be there on the page.

INTERVIEWER

Is there something you feel is your principal weakness as a poet?

GLÜCK

Yes, I think I have a sort of recalcitrantly iambic ear. I think that’s very limiting, so I pay a lot of attention to it.

INTERVIEWER

Recalcitrantly iambic?

GLÜCK

I think English settles naturally into iambs, and it’s sort of soporific. I mean, I had that sound in my head when I was a little child, and I wrote to that sound.

INTERVIEWER

It’s the sound of the heartbeat.

GLÜCK

Well, I know, but you need to throw in a little chemical once in a while to make it move in a different way. That’s the weakness I’m most aware of.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever put aside a poem you’re writing and work on another, or do you always work on a poem until it’s finished?

GLÜCK

Occasionally, a poem can take a really a long time, and at some point I despair of it, so it may become part of something else, but usually I’m writing just one poem, and everything I think of becomes part of that poem. I like it when there’s a disparity of elements, because it keeps the poem from being a straight shot from my head to the page, though sometimes those ones are the best things you write.

INTERVIEWER

Though you speak of long silences, your Poems 1962–2012 (2012) fills almost seven hundred pages, and you’ve published two books since. Are you never completely blocked?

GLÜCK

I hate that kind of vocabulary, because it presumes that there should be an uninterrupted fluency. Block is not a word I would use, because I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write and different news to tell from that space. I’m unhappy, mostly, when I’m not writing, unless I’ve just written something, in which case I’m euphoric because I don’t have to try and write something again, but the fact of being not happy doesn’t mean that I think that I can put an end to it. I think it’s an ordeal I have to live through. I feel kind of pious about this. I keep records of what I write—I started doing this in the sixties—and I can see in my little charts that there were these years when nothing was written, an X for every month, and then when something was written it was so different from the last thing written two years before. I don’t think I could have gotten to that doing busywork for two years. I think I got there because I shut up and waited. I could be wrong—maybe that’s not why I got there and maybe I would have gotten there faster—but my sense of my experience is that you have to wait out certain nadirs. You just wait them out, and if you continue to want to write, you’ll write, and if you stop wanting to write then you’ll have a small gift, and it’s just as well to be informed of that.  

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