Description
"Writing is not decanting of personality. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned." Louise Glück from Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994).
Louise Elisabeth Glück (pronounced "Glick") was born April 22, 1943 in New York City and grew up on Long Island.
Glück graduated in 1961 from Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, NY. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, and Columbia University, New York City. Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award (Triumph of Achilles), the Academy of American Poet's Prize (Firstborn), as well as numerous Guggenheim fellowships.
She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was previously a Senior Lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. Currently, Glück is teaching at Yale.
Glück's poetry often deals with what maybe can best be described as the spiritual, the matters that seem to go beyond the physical world we know. Below are three poems of Glück's that do just that.
The Fear of Burial
In the empty field, in the morning,
the body waits to be claimed.
The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock--
nothing comes to give it form again.
Think of the body's loneliness.
At night pacing the sheared field,
its shadow buckled tightly around.
Such a long journey.
And already the remote, trembling lights of the village
not pausing for it as they scan the rows.
How far away they seem,
the wooden doors, the bread and milk
laid like weights on the table.
from Descending Figure. © 1980 Louise Glück. Online Source
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.
from The Wild Iris. © 1992 Louise Glück. Online Source
The Red Poppy
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
from The Wild Iris. © 1992 Louise Glück. Online Source
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