The Live Louise Glück
It’s bizarre to discover that someone you believe you’ve buried, or at least consciously half-written off, can prove to have been one of the vital forces underneath the passion in your life. We may try to quash that once potent growth out, but it remains rooted, never to be questioned. A life is built on the lives before it. Ultimately, at the end of the act, we can’t fool anyone, and the most distant stranger can instantly perceive whom we revere, no matter how hard we try to hide them. If I’ve gone away from Louise Glück in recent years, I have also always carried her writing and her voice within me.
The most renowned US novelist and US poet have died, within four months of each other and in the same year—Cormac McCarthy and Louise Glück. Others will dispute those designations, but I believe their international reputations merit such titles. Both were writers of lament, and both returned to the words “earth,” “planet,” and “abyss” in trying to explicate some foremost feeling inside about living and dying, the cycle of life. I had thought to summon something on McCarthy in the weeks following his death, but as the summer days wore on, the passion proved not to be there. I found I’d somehow already said all I needed to about his work in an essay on Anthony Mann. The question of violence can go only so far, and for that we turn to McCarthy for his early work, primarily up to Blood Meridian, reading for his strange torques of syntax and gothic descriptions; the dialogue makes us laugh, but the over-reliance on it in the last books lends an unliterary twang to his orchestration. We hear a lot as if in a play, but we are in a book—an odd disjunction. If I’d written about the personal effect McCarthy had on me, I would have described how certain artists serve as markers in one’s life: their art measures time and colors our moments, so we live the art as we simultaneously live the life, as per Pater and Proust.
By chance, Glück came into my life at the same moment McCarthy did, around 2002. I didn’t really know what a poem was back then—and now I’m still not sure what poetry is or how to describe it sufficiently for another person to stop their self-chatter and feel the sound of my heart. I treated poems more as bulletins or flyers—as moments of written time bearing the long strain of hours in creation though devoured in a matter of minutes—to impress upon another person my seriousness, or to set a tone, a mood, maybe take us to another realm. All of that would change when I encountered Wallace Stevens, a poet who similarly startled Glück, who wrote, “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens.”
I returned to Glück a little more battered, grayer, and with deeper crows’ feet after that rich confrontation with Stevens’ language and his almost impenetrable metaphors. I remained in need of succor because I was still too young or at least not mature enough to extract such a tender essence from Stevens as I did from Glück; it would arrive after a decade in thrall to that cipher who produced more poetry at the end of his life than at the beginning, just like Glück.
The dilemma with Glück only glittered after her death: Yes, her carefully chosen words often trigger uncomfortable sensations in our shared modern, anxiety-laden consciousness, and still they are as narcotic: they entrance as a rich dessert takes one’s breath and other senses. These poems are written as if in response to a cuddling lover’s request to “tell me a story,” as though one were enjoining Glück to make their love life more like childhood. The verse rolls out simply in polysemous voices—a mixture of two of the voices of poetry that T.S. Eliot identified: “The first is the voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small.” Glück’s vocality is her great mark—the tail of the comet—both the voice inscribed on the page and her voicing her speakers at readings. Her speakers give midnight confessions, but they stay flush and vibrant. Her tone poems are like Ingmar Bergman close-ups (face for voices, eyes and mouth as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs), rivaling his staunch dialogue of “Do you realize I hate you?” though they share the same chilly, cloistered settings: island life both real and metaphorical, or a person alone in a house or just with their lover, running through their memories of early or late life.
When you grow up alongside a writer and see them change and rearrange and deliver a new object still dripping sweat, that object looks different to you than if you were merely recovering it from the long march of literature by the no-longer living. This could be what Robert Musil meant when he wrote, “Youth overvalues the newest, because it feels itself to be the same age as it.” Hardly anyone alive can claim to have known the first Ezra Pound, the translator and maker of Persona, and then the Pound of the first staggering “Cantos,” followed by the hateful and ponderous ones, before he reclaimed his crown in the Pisan sequence.
I kept and later carefully cut Glück’s longest poem, “October,” out of The New Yorker when it arrived at my house in the fall of 2003. I moved to New York and clamored to hear her read from her newly published collection containing the poem, Averno. Listening to her voice after palely intimating it in my head (I had once seen a video of her reading) was like seeing a painting in the museum after encountering a photo of it in a book, or even comparable to watching Velazquez put the final touches on a painting in his studio. It was witnessing Glück enact this process that helped me discover the “voice” of poetry that four-hundred years of print has conditioned us not to hear. (Print, wrote Walter Ong, “encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion.”) Glück’s intonation was slow, measured, and delivered in a crinkly half-New York, half-Long Island accent, sometimes pleading, sometimes arch. There was no forbidden space between her and me, like there was and ever would be with the mostly invisible McCarthy (most everyone’s experience). The fact that Glück let her audience into her space was crucial to the experience of her poetry. She was not remote but alive, her tongue set free to ministrate or cajole, to lament or disdain.
I have marked my time with Glück in a much different manner than with McCarthy. Sitting with Suttree on my lap, requisitioning the dictionary to hunt down the archaic words, I nevertheless felt I responded to a figure that did not walk amongst us and share the same pain, but kept monk-like at the Sante Fe Institute. With Glück, I was not so much an audience member at a “performance” as a witness to another’s body delivering their art as they would in the deep midnight of their solitude. The body is prime, and the body carries the voice: this could be why the word “embody” exists and is commonly called upon to describe a feeling of union. The words give body to a spirit, and the voice gives words to other bodies. Glück’s poem “Crossroads” is her ode to the body:
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised
—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
McCarthy (the texts of McCarthy), for all his sublimity, isn’t an embodied literature in the way Glück’s oeuvre is. He is distant, dark, too sure that he doesn’t need me, whereas a spectral air foments around Glück: she is an earth mother in her new-age detour from Demeter, or, as William Logan writes, she is “our great poet of annihilation and disgust, our demigoddess of depression.” I don’t need to see myself specifically in her poetry because I can see in it the general plane of humanity, both the good and the bad bacteria of life, with the far field of death not so distant every hour. My life has been more rounded by the sweep of her questioning voice, not only on the page, but in the memory of those waves of sound, the breath that stirred the syllabication of off-rhymes and such, the simple plaintive statements:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.