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Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Proofs and Theories , winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise Glück, one of this country's most brilliant poets. Like her poems, the prose of Glück, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for The Wild Iris , is compressed, fastidious, fierce, alert, and absolutely unconsoled. The force of her thought is evident everywhere in these essays, from her explorations of other poets' work to her skeptical contemplation of current literary critical notions such as "sincerity" and "courage." Here also are Glück's revealing reflections on her own education and life as a poet, and a tribute to her teacher and mentor, Stanley Kunitz. Proofs and Theories is not a casual collection. It is the testament of a major poet.
134 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Louise Glück
95 books2,148 followersAmerican poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.
Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.
She was the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.
In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), 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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."
Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teached as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.
Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.
She was the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.
In 2001, Yale University awarded Louise Glück its Bollingen Prize in Poetry, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement in his or her art. Her other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize (Wellesley, 1986), 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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anniversary Medal (2000), and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."
Glück also worked as a senior lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, served as a member of the faculty of the University of Iowa and taught at Goddard College in Vermont. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teached as the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale University and in the creative writing program of Boston University.
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June 26, 2016
Proofs and Theories is a collection of essays on poetry written by one of the most celebrated living american poets: Louise Gluck. I first came across her work in my high school textbook and it felt like something that had a power so personal it overwhelmed me, i felt the way i generally feel when i come across some bizarre and uncomfortable realisation, or when Im faced with my own helplessness, or when I am reminded by the cold, detached nature of life. I felt like i had been pushed into a body of water, and the water had seeped into my skull, behind my eyeballs.
These essays were clearly written by the same person who wrote those poems, what I mean by this is that Gluck doesn't seem to have a distinctly academic style in her criticism, they are both deeply personal accounts of a reader of poetry and a writer of poetry. One of my absolute favourite essays of hers is 'Invitation and Exclusion' an essay which tries to analyse a poems attitude towards a reader, if it invited, excludes, or exists in a totally different dimension.
Overall this is such a wonderful book.
These essays were clearly written by the same person who wrote those poems, what I mean by this is that Gluck doesn't seem to have a distinctly academic style in her criticism, they are both deeply personal accounts of a reader of poetry and a writer of poetry. One of my absolute favourite essays of hers is 'Invitation and Exclusion' an essay which tries to analyse a poems attitude towards a reader, if it invited, excludes, or exists in a totally different dimension.
Overall this is such a wonderful book.
July 1, 2012
Gluck's keen, incisive prose is all of a piece with her stunning poetry. I come back to these essays again and again for their penetrating insights into the genre.
October 31, 2023
This book is an exquisite glimpse deeper into the mind of a lustrous poet. Several of these essays are short comparative pieces on poets like George Open, TS Eliot, Williams Carlos Williams, Hugh Seidman, Keats, and Emily Dickenson. Her examinations of Eliot are particularly astute, and I treasured her frequent references to Wallace Stevens (a favorite of mine). But far more striking are the stories from her life, her philosophic excursions, and her essays on her writing.
"....to separate the shallow from the deep, and to choose the deep."
"From the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words. I liked scale, but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind."She writes about the sweetness of paradox and the challenge of ending a poem "without sealing it shut". Glück also frequently returns to forms of voluntary silence, the telling omission, the power of white space, of the unsaid.
"I love what is implicit or present in outline, that which summons (as opposed to imposes) thought.... I find oddly depressing that which seems to have left out nothing. Such poetry seems to love completion too much, and like a thoroughly cleaned room, it paralyzes activity.The powerful closing piece of this book is from her 1993 Baccalaureate Address at Williams College. In it, Glück prepares her audience of graduates to make meaning of the suffering that will inevitably arise in their future ("The future is not assured; that is its drama.")
I am attracted to the ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence. ... Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied."
"I tell you these thigns to prepare you, to encourage you, but preparation does not preclude suffering. The question isn't whether or not you will suffer. You will suffer. At issue is the meaning of suffering, or the yield.
Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair. ... The deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade.
Realize then, that impoverishment is also a teacher, unique in its capacity to renew, and that its yield, when it ends, is a passionate openness which in turn re-invests the world with meaning. ... Intensity of awareness is impoverishment's aftermath and blessing."
"....to separate the shallow from the deep, and to choose the deep."
March 8, 2008
As I was with her poetry, Louise Glück's prose put me in a place of awe. This woman's mind is a labyrinth of intelligence, insight and fierce passion for the craft and study of poetry. To read these essays is to sit in the presence of a teacher who has learned to impart knowledge in a succinct and permeating way. They blend a perfect mix of personal experience, theory and academic discourse on both the writing and reading of poetry, while also leaving enough room for the reader to easily apply their numerous lessons to one's own craft and career as a writer, as well as help readers of poetry come to a deeper understanding of this art form.
March 4, 2020
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/pr...
...as long as one is working the thing itself is wrong or unfinished: a failure. Still, this engagement is absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known. And the poem is finished, and at that moment, instantly detached: it becomes what it was first perceived to be, a thing always in existence. No record exists of the poet’s agency. And the poet, from that point, isn’t a poet anymore, simply someone who wished to be one…
Glück voiced my thinking to a tee above. It is always what comes next for me. The satisfaction of producing something of note only lasts for a few moments and then on to the next poem, which may or may not ever happen again. The poem is no longer enough to make you even feel like a poet or that you belong in some lofty position for having created it. It is as if it happened by accident even though the work was as focused as anything ever done in life before. The constant beating and shaping, rearranging and eliminating, returning to the beginning, feeling frustrated to the point of exhilaration. And then nothing after the fact.
...What has driven these poems first is terror and need of the understandable other. When the terror becomes unbearable, the other becomes god…
Again Glück is point on. Unfortunately, for me at least, I am no closer to the truth or devoid of the feeling of terror than when I first began composing. It was simply a distraction that was beneficial to creating a piece of art. A thing called “made-time”, and not of this world.
...the source of art is experience, the end product truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of truth...There is, unfortunately, no test for truth. That is, in part, why artists suffer…
Funny how much the search for truth occupied me as a young man, an impetus for experimental drugs, and the failure ever to find this truth I craved. As I aged and learned from experience, guided by literature in all its forms, cursed with the ever-present need to create something whether it be music, painting, photography, a short story or poem, anything to get me closer to this thing I desired which we might as well now call truth. I believe it is what Glück is, a seeker just like me, probably like all of us if we took the time to see.
...Once a poem is resolved , I lose the sense of having written it. I can remember circumstances, but not sensations,not what it felt like to be writing...Between poems, I am not a poet, only someone with a yearning to achieve—what? That concentration again.
The quotation above was lifted from Glück’s essay titled, Death and Absence. Again, what strikes me the most succinctly is Glück’s perhaps complete understanding for the impetus behind her hard work. Almost every essay in this book concerns itself with the importance of both reading and writing good work. I cannot imagine a scenario in which Glück would accept an inferior, pretentious, or adorned poem as being something meaningful. Glück is serious about the poetry she writes and certainly discerning of those poems she reads. And that makes these well-wrought essays worth reading.
...as long as one is working the thing itself is wrong or unfinished: a failure. Still, this engagement is absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known. And the poem is finished, and at that moment, instantly detached: it becomes what it was first perceived to be, a thing always in existence. No record exists of the poet’s agency. And the poet, from that point, isn’t a poet anymore, simply someone who wished to be one…
Glück voiced my thinking to a tee above. It is always what comes next for me. The satisfaction of producing something of note only lasts for a few moments and then on to the next poem, which may or may not ever happen again. The poem is no longer enough to make you even feel like a poet or that you belong in some lofty position for having created it. It is as if it happened by accident even though the work was as focused as anything ever done in life before. The constant beating and shaping, rearranging and eliminating, returning to the beginning, feeling frustrated to the point of exhilaration. And then nothing after the fact.
...What has driven these poems first is terror and need of the understandable other. When the terror becomes unbearable, the other becomes god…
Again Glück is point on. Unfortunately, for me at least, I am no closer to the truth or devoid of the feeling of terror than when I first began composing. It was simply a distraction that was beneficial to creating a piece of art. A thing called “made-time”, and not of this world.
...the source of art is experience, the end product truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of truth...There is, unfortunately, no test for truth. That is, in part, why artists suffer…
Funny how much the search for truth occupied me as a young man, an impetus for experimental drugs, and the failure ever to find this truth I craved. As I aged and learned from experience, guided by literature in all its forms, cursed with the ever-present need to create something whether it be music, painting, photography, a short story or poem, anything to get me closer to this thing I desired which we might as well now call truth. I believe it is what Glück is, a seeker just like me, probably like all of us if we took the time to see.
...Once a poem is resolved , I lose the sense of having written it. I can remember circumstances, but not sensations,not what it felt like to be writing...Between poems, I am not a poet, only someone with a yearning to achieve—what? That concentration again.
The quotation above was lifted from Glück’s essay titled, Death and Absence. Again, what strikes me the most succinctly is Glück’s perhaps complete understanding for the impetus behind her hard work. Almost every essay in this book concerns itself with the importance of both reading and writing good work. I cannot imagine a scenario in which Glück would accept an inferior, pretentious, or adorned poem as being something meaningful. Glück is serious about the poetry she writes and certainly discerning of those poems she reads. And that makes these well-wrought essays worth reading.
December 8, 2009
Hmm. I'm going to make notes on this as I read, to help me digest:
EDUCATION OF THE POET: I thought this would be more general, but it's very specific to Gluck's life. I had no idea she was anorexic as a teenager or that she credited her seven years in psychoanalysis as necessary to her critical/emotional/poetic thinking skills. Ever since she was a child Gluck had the opinion that "there was no point to speech if speech did not precisely articulate perception." Good description of Gluck's aesthetic.
THE IDEA OF COURAGE: Not sure I get her argument. As far as I can tell: Poets should be aware of the idea of "courage" as they produce poems. "Courage" means that their poetic materials are somehow "personal." But, really, poets are not courageous in writing--writing involves ecstasy, exhilaration, no courage required. And poets are not really courageous in that a poem can never truly risk shame--the reader and poet are too far apart, or the poet is too far apart from the poem (i.e. once she's done creating, she's detached.)
So what's her point? She says poets should pay attention to the notion of courage, but then she discusses all the way that writing poetry doesn't really require courage. I am confused.
Also, I disagree with her opinion that writing requires no courage--I know that overcoming writerly anxiety is often one of my biggest hurdles to working on a poem.
AGAINST SINCERITY: Will again try to reconstruct the argument. She starts by defining "actuality" (the world of event), "truth" (the illumination or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art), and "honesty/sincerity" ('telling the truth'). She says, "the artist's task involves the transformation of the actual to the true." (I find this a helpful distinction. Following you so far, Louise.) Another helpful summary: "the source of art is experience, the end product truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of truth." Ok, so Gluck has captured one of the paradoxes of art: to "reflect" life, the artist constantly chooses what to leave in and what to leave out, what to highlight and what to minimize--in other words, the artist "lies" to get at truth.
Gluck then goes on to discuss a number of poets: Whitman, Rilke, Keats, Milton, and Berryman. Here's where I get lost, as I'm not too sure what her point is on any of them. She seems to designate all except Milton as poets of "sincerity"--but since she seems so laudatory, I think I might be missing something. Maybe she is saying that although they use the materials of personal experience, they manipulate enough so as to achieve "truth" and not "sincerity"?
She ends by arguing that the best poets work like Keats--they cultivate an absence of bias; the reader will feel that the poems are like experiments, the poet was not wed to any one outcome. In opposition to this are poets that "claustrophobically oversee or bully or dictate response." Well, this seems true enough, I like the idea of poems as experiments.
Her final note is that "the true, in poetry, is felt as insight. It is very rare, but beside it, other poems seem merely intelligent comment."
I think I agree with Gluck's distinctions between "actuality," "truth," and "sincerity," but I don't know what she's trying to say about the poets. And does this essay contradict "the idea of courage" (if that essay was, in fact, promoting the notion of the personal in poetry)? I'd be interested to know if Gluck thinks courage produces truth, honesty, or both (to use her terms).
THE FORBIDDEN: The basic argument is that the "forbidden" is a topic ripe for good poetry, but that treating taboo subjects, etc., can fail if the poetry is too rigid in its sensibility (Linda McCarriston) or too limited in its scope or objective (Sharon Olds). Gluck praises other poets (Martha Rhodes and Frank Bidart) for successfully making danger a real, experiential presence and for treating the self with ambivalence (rather than soley as brave survivor). Essentially Gluck thinks that "constriction" of any kind is what makes treatment of the forbidden (and any poem, really) fail.
It doesn't seem fair that she excerpts from Rhodes and Bidart but not the poets she pooh-poohs. Also, she makes a pronouncement at the end that McCarriston and Olds are operating from "the felt obligation of the woman writer to give encouraging voice to the life force". Offers no proof for this pronouncement. I was also amused at the similiarities between Rhodes and Gluck's poetry.
Overall, though, an interesting discussion on how to evaluate "confessional" poetry. I'm glad Gluck is brave enough to scorn some of this "personal trauma" poetry, and not treat it with white gloves because of its subject matter and its autobiographical nature. I like how she uses reader response as a litmus test: "the test for emotional authority is emotional impact." Well said.
DISRUPTION, HESITATION, SILENCE: This is a pretty straightforward essay. Gluck makes an argument that she has sort of made elsewhere in the book--she vetoes an aesthetic of thoroughness and exhaustive detail because this does not really capture the essence of how an experience feels. So, in other words, very narrative poems don't really do it for her--piling upon the detail does not convey the immediacy and pulp of the event. Fair enough, I agree.
Gluck describes Berryman as the master of "not saying," which perhaps seems ironic because of the profusion of voices. But the multiple voices make it impossible to locate any stable self. Agreed.
She talks about Oppen, whom I have never read, so I skipped that section. Also touches on Eliot's "Prufrock."
She concludes by arguing that "a danger of an expansive poems is that tension is lost." Hmm, I don't think that's necessarily true. She summarizes by stating that she wants to "speak for the virtues of a style which inclines to the suggested over the amplified." Well, I like both styles, but I could see how Louise, who loves concision, would favor suggestion. Although her poems are often quite declarative. But I guess declarative is different from both suggested and amplified--sort of in between the two.
DISINTEREDNESS: This is a weird little essay. Her argument pertains to how one should read, opposed to how one should write. She says that a reader ought to totally disengage while reading a piece of literature--he ought to "become" the work as much as possible, and not insert his own ego, which will highlight, exaggerate, minimize--in other words, which will distort.
On the one hand, yes, the idea of "becoming" any piece of writing is appealing--there's this notion of full absorption and comprehension if the reader isn't "fighting against" the piece. But in practical terms, forcing yourself to disengage is easier said than done. And I think that "conversing" with a work by questioning it, etc., is one of the best ways to get to know a work. Maybe I think (at least with poem reading) that one ought to suspend judgement (I think that's really what Gluck is talking about) on the first few reads, and become more critical after that.
THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1993: INTRODUCTION: Rather a wandering (though very articulate) essay. She basically talks about what makes poetic voice indelible, and then talks more specifically about her work selecting the best American poems. My favorite quotes in the essay: "Indelible voice, though it has no impact on the non-human universe, profoundly alters human experience of that universe." "The poem, no matter how charged its content, will not survive on content but through voice." The latter especially--yes, agreed! It's voice that will make the poem truly leave its mark.
THE DREAMER AND THE WATCHER:(By the way, I love Gluck's titles for her essays in this book--she sets up helpful distinctions in the essay to come while preserving her concise poetic voice).
She essentially analyzes her poem "Night Song" in this essay, and also talks about how she generates material. Gluck says all her poems "begin in some fragment of motivating language--the task of writing the poem is the search for context." She says her challenge is to "trace [the poems:] back to some source in the world," contrasted to other poets who start in the world, with concrete experience. I think I am sometimes a poet of the latter (experience) but not always--sometimes I write from Gluck's origin (language), and very often from a different origin (image). It makes me ponder what other places poets start from.
Her close reading of her own work was very enjoyable--added more to the poem for me.
She ends talking about other ways to generate. "It was clear to me long ago that any hope I had of writing real poetry depended on my living through common experiences." But she states that she was "wary of drama, disaster too deliberately courted." This has stuck with me--the balance between living a life, and courting real experience, but not putting oneself in extreme or unhealthy situations for the purpose of generating art.
ON STANLEY KUNITZ: I haven't read Kunitz's poetry, but that wasn't really relevant to the essay. She talks about how valuable his "truth-telling" was to her, highlighting a common theme in the book--how important the pursuit of truth is to Gluck.
INVITATION AND EXCLUSION: She contrasts poets of invitation (like Eliot and Dickinson) with poets of exclusion (like Stevens and Plath). I buy her arguments in this essay, for the most part. Eliot, in his questioning and yearning, does invite a reader in, and Dickinson, though she can be opaque, nevertheless wants the reader to figure out her "code." I don't really get what Gluck is saying about Plath. But I agree that Stevens seems like he's permitting himself to be overheard, he's not helping the reader out in any way in terms of comprehension.
Gluck says that she can admire both types of poets, but only the poets of invitation actually encourage and inspire her to write. She argues that a reader can fully "occupy" one of these poems and therefore spiral off from it, move on. However, an exclusive poem, because it is impenetrable, will only evoke weak and frusterated imitation. The idea of occupation seems a bit abstract to me, but I could see how this could be true for someone.
The distinction between types of poets is interesting. But I wonder, are there more types of poets than just the inviting ones and the excluding ones? I'm sure there are poems that do both in the same poem, for example. What other attitudes could a poet have towards the reader? Lots, inviting and exclusive are just two, but I think they are two basic and important ones.
ON IMPOVERISHMENT: Gluck's graduation-day speech to Williams' undergrads in 1993. Basically, she talks about how despair, depression, and periods of ennui can be necessary to personal and creative development (cheerful!) She has this good paragraph:
"Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace the faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair."
I really like that line about how the self cannot be forced back. I think it's very true.
EDUCATION OF THE POET: I thought this would be more general, but it's very specific to Gluck's life. I had no idea she was anorexic as a teenager or that she credited her seven years in psychoanalysis as necessary to her critical/emotional/poetic thinking skills. Ever since she was a child Gluck had the opinion that "there was no point to speech if speech did not precisely articulate perception." Good description of Gluck's aesthetic.
THE IDEA OF COURAGE: Not sure I get her argument. As far as I can tell: Poets should be aware of the idea of "courage" as they produce poems. "Courage" means that their poetic materials are somehow "personal." But, really, poets are not courageous in writing--writing involves ecstasy, exhilaration, no courage required. And poets are not really courageous in that a poem can never truly risk shame--the reader and poet are too far apart, or the poet is too far apart from the poem (i.e. once she's done creating, she's detached.)
So what's her point? She says poets should pay attention to the notion of courage, but then she discusses all the way that writing poetry doesn't really require courage. I am confused.
Also, I disagree with her opinion that writing requires no courage--I know that overcoming writerly anxiety is often one of my biggest hurdles to working on a poem.
AGAINST SINCERITY: Will again try to reconstruct the argument. She starts by defining "actuality" (the world of event), "truth" (the illumination or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art), and "honesty/sincerity" ('telling the truth'). She says, "the artist's task involves the transformation of the actual to the true." (I find this a helpful distinction. Following you so far, Louise.) Another helpful summary: "the source of art is experience, the end product truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of truth." Ok, so Gluck has captured one of the paradoxes of art: to "reflect" life, the artist constantly chooses what to leave in and what to leave out, what to highlight and what to minimize--in other words, the artist "lies" to get at truth.
Gluck then goes on to discuss a number of poets: Whitman, Rilke, Keats, Milton, and Berryman. Here's where I get lost, as I'm not too sure what her point is on any of them. She seems to designate all except Milton as poets of "sincerity"--but since she seems so laudatory, I think I might be missing something. Maybe she is saying that although they use the materials of personal experience, they manipulate enough so as to achieve "truth" and not "sincerity"?
She ends by arguing that the best poets work like Keats--they cultivate an absence of bias; the reader will feel that the poems are like experiments, the poet was not wed to any one outcome. In opposition to this are poets that "claustrophobically oversee or bully or dictate response." Well, this seems true enough, I like the idea of poems as experiments.
Her final note is that "the true, in poetry, is felt as insight. It is very rare, but beside it, other poems seem merely intelligent comment."
I think I agree with Gluck's distinctions between "actuality," "truth," and "sincerity," but I don't know what she's trying to say about the poets. And does this essay contradict "the idea of courage" (if that essay was, in fact, promoting the notion of the personal in poetry)? I'd be interested to know if Gluck thinks courage produces truth, honesty, or both (to use her terms).
THE FORBIDDEN: The basic argument is that the "forbidden" is a topic ripe for good poetry, but that treating taboo subjects, etc., can fail if the poetry is too rigid in its sensibility (Linda McCarriston) or too limited in its scope or objective (Sharon Olds). Gluck praises other poets (Martha Rhodes and Frank Bidart) for successfully making danger a real, experiential presence and for treating the self with ambivalence (rather than soley as brave survivor). Essentially Gluck thinks that "constriction" of any kind is what makes treatment of the forbidden (and any poem, really) fail.
It doesn't seem fair that she excerpts from Rhodes and Bidart but not the poets she pooh-poohs. Also, she makes a pronouncement at the end that McCarriston and Olds are operating from "the felt obligation of the woman writer to give encouraging voice to the life force". Offers no proof for this pronouncement. I was also amused at the similiarities between Rhodes and Gluck's poetry.
Overall, though, an interesting discussion on how to evaluate "confessional" poetry. I'm glad Gluck is brave enough to scorn some of this "personal trauma" poetry, and not treat it with white gloves because of its subject matter and its autobiographical nature. I like how she uses reader response as a litmus test: "the test for emotional authority is emotional impact." Well said.
DISRUPTION, HESITATION, SILENCE: This is a pretty straightforward essay. Gluck makes an argument that she has sort of made elsewhere in the book--she vetoes an aesthetic of thoroughness and exhaustive detail because this does not really capture the essence of how an experience feels. So, in other words, very narrative poems don't really do it for her--piling upon the detail does not convey the immediacy and pulp of the event. Fair enough, I agree.
Gluck describes Berryman as the master of "not saying," which perhaps seems ironic because of the profusion of voices. But the multiple voices make it impossible to locate any stable self. Agreed.
She talks about Oppen, whom I have never read, so I skipped that section. Also touches on Eliot's "Prufrock."
She concludes by arguing that "a danger of an expansive poems is that tension is lost." Hmm, I don't think that's necessarily true. She summarizes by stating that she wants to "speak for the virtues of a style which inclines to the suggested over the amplified." Well, I like both styles, but I could see how Louise, who loves concision, would favor suggestion. Although her poems are often quite declarative. But I guess declarative is different from both suggested and amplified--sort of in between the two.
DISINTEREDNESS: This is a weird little essay. Her argument pertains to how one should read, opposed to how one should write. She says that a reader ought to totally disengage while reading a piece of literature--he ought to "become" the work as much as possible, and not insert his own ego, which will highlight, exaggerate, minimize--in other words, which will distort.
On the one hand, yes, the idea of "becoming" any piece of writing is appealing--there's this notion of full absorption and comprehension if the reader isn't "fighting against" the piece. But in practical terms, forcing yourself to disengage is easier said than done. And I think that "conversing" with a work by questioning it, etc., is one of the best ways to get to know a work. Maybe I think (at least with poem reading) that one ought to suspend judgement (I think that's really what Gluck is talking about) on the first few reads, and become more critical after that.
THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1993: INTRODUCTION: Rather a wandering (though very articulate) essay. She basically talks about what makes poetic voice indelible, and then talks more specifically about her work selecting the best American poems. My favorite quotes in the essay: "Indelible voice, though it has no impact on the non-human universe, profoundly alters human experience of that universe." "The poem, no matter how charged its content, will not survive on content but through voice." The latter especially--yes, agreed! It's voice that will make the poem truly leave its mark.
THE DREAMER AND THE WATCHER:(By the way, I love Gluck's titles for her essays in this book--she sets up helpful distinctions in the essay to come while preserving her concise poetic voice).
She essentially analyzes her poem "Night Song" in this essay, and also talks about how she generates material. Gluck says all her poems "begin in some fragment of motivating language--the task of writing the poem is the search for context." She says her challenge is to "trace [the poems:] back to some source in the world," contrasted to other poets who start in the world, with concrete experience. I think I am sometimes a poet of the latter (experience) but not always--sometimes I write from Gluck's origin (language), and very often from a different origin (image). It makes me ponder what other places poets start from.
Her close reading of her own work was very enjoyable--added more to the poem for me.
She ends talking about other ways to generate. "It was clear to me long ago that any hope I had of writing real poetry depended on my living through common experiences." But she states that she was "wary of drama, disaster too deliberately courted." This has stuck with me--the balance between living a life, and courting real experience, but not putting oneself in extreme or unhealthy situations for the purpose of generating art.
ON STANLEY KUNITZ: I haven't read Kunitz's poetry, but that wasn't really relevant to the essay. She talks about how valuable his "truth-telling" was to her, highlighting a common theme in the book--how important the pursuit of truth is to Gluck.
INVITATION AND EXCLUSION: She contrasts poets of invitation (like Eliot and Dickinson) with poets of exclusion (like Stevens and Plath). I buy her arguments in this essay, for the most part. Eliot, in his questioning and yearning, does invite a reader in, and Dickinson, though she can be opaque, nevertheless wants the reader to figure out her "code." I don't really get what Gluck is saying about Plath. But I agree that Stevens seems like he's permitting himself to be overheard, he's not helping the reader out in any way in terms of comprehension.
Gluck says that she can admire both types of poets, but only the poets of invitation actually encourage and inspire her to write. She argues that a reader can fully "occupy" one of these poems and therefore spiral off from it, move on. However, an exclusive poem, because it is impenetrable, will only evoke weak and frusterated imitation. The idea of occupation seems a bit abstract to me, but I could see how this could be true for someone.
The distinction between types of poets is interesting. But I wonder, are there more types of poets than just the inviting ones and the excluding ones? I'm sure there are poems that do both in the same poem, for example. What other attitudes could a poet have towards the reader? Lots, inviting and exclusive are just two, but I think they are two basic and important ones.
ON IMPOVERISHMENT: Gluck's graduation-day speech to Williams' undergrads in 1993. Basically, she talks about how despair, depression, and periods of ennui can be necessary to personal and creative development (cheerful!) She has this good paragraph:
"Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace the faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair."
I really like that line about how the self cannot be forced back. I think it's very true.
November 14, 2022
strange how differently I'm reading and rating this now. It's only been a year (and a half? maybe less) since I read this for my master's and now it rings infinitismally more true and relevant for my diss. so this is nice.
October 1, 2025
The world is complete without us. Intolerable fact. To which the poet responds by rebelling, wanting to prove otherwise. Out of wounded vanity or stubborn pride or desolate need, the poet lives in chronic dispute with fact, and an astonishment occurs: another fact is created, like a new element, in partial contradiction of the intolerable. Indelible voice, though it has no impact on the non-human universe, profoundly alters human experience of that universe, as well as of the world of relations, the solitude of the apparently marginal soul.
This collection of essays contains some of the most honest and insightful writing I have had the privilege to read. There is no easy sentiment here--only depth, nuance, and unending complication, reminders that "the superiority of the poet consists of her scorn for consolation, her refusal to concede resemblance."
Most of these essays include critical analyses of various poems. Referenced authors include T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and plenty more. And while the critical insights into each writer's style and belief are exacting and precise, more valuable still are those into the workings of the artistic mind--Gluck's own as well as the general. Sometimes, but not always, one follows from the other: observation of life springs from observation of poetry, and vice versa. The result is a resounding testament to the power of human thought and feeling. Not the easy and saccharine feelings of the monuments to bullshit with which our current cultural landscape is saturated--the Hallmark card, the superhero movie, the embarrassingly self-conscious act of political theater--but feelings that tend to go unspoken for their ephemerality and inexpressibility. These, for Gluck, are the only currency in which the poet is permitted to trade.
I never met Louise Gluck, but judging by her insistence on the writer's obligation to express the inexpressible, I'm certain she would be disappointed to see me end this review the only way I can: with an admission that I cannot fully convey the emotions that this text reminded me of my obligation to harbor and nourish. I hope to live long enough to return to this collection again and again.
When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice.
And I write to speak to those I have heard.
This collection of essays contains some of the most honest and insightful writing I have had the privilege to read. There is no easy sentiment here--only depth, nuance, and unending complication, reminders that "the superiority of the poet consists of her scorn for consolation, her refusal to concede resemblance."
Most of these essays include critical analyses of various poems. Referenced authors include T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and plenty more. And while the critical insights into each writer's style and belief are exacting and precise, more valuable still are those into the workings of the artistic mind--Gluck's own as well as the general. Sometimes, but not always, one follows from the other: observation of life springs from observation of poetry, and vice versa. The result is a resounding testament to the power of human thought and feeling. Not the easy and saccharine feelings of the monuments to bullshit with which our current cultural landscape is saturated--the Hallmark card, the superhero movie, the embarrassingly self-conscious act of political theater--but feelings that tend to go unspoken for their ephemerality and inexpressibility. These, for Gluck, are the only currency in which the poet is permitted to trade.
I never met Louise Gluck, but judging by her insistence on the writer's obligation to express the inexpressible, I'm certain she would be disappointed to see me end this review the only way I can: with an admission that I cannot fully convey the emotions that this text reminded me of my obligation to harbor and nourish. I hope to live long enough to return to this collection again and again.
When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice.
And I write to speak to those I have heard.
Want to read
May 22, 2022Hello. I am currently house/teen-sitting for a bestie’s family for 2 nights. I sleep in their study (which in fact holds the most comfortable futon & softest pillows in the world, i love sleeping over here, which ive done many times in high school bc i live very far from our school) — anyhow, i decide to poke around the bookshelves in this room, which unsurprisingly hold many treasures as both her parents are writers, w one being an English prof in cle and a poet of a book i read last fall if u wanna go try to find it on my 2021 list. I picked up 2 Louis Glück books and hope to finish at least one during my stay here. I notice that inside both these covers her dad had left a little note, his signature, a date, and “love.” So so cute. I adore her parents. I want this, i want to find myself a poet who will gift me books with lil notes inscribed behind the cover, enough to fill the shelves in my future study, w art on the walls and many golden-glowing lamps. That is all.
October 17, 2023
"The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea."
"The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion
for language, which is thought to mean delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word. The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like “incarnadine.” This was not my experience. From the time, at four or five or six, I first started reading poems, first thought of the poets I read as my companions, my predecessors —from the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words."
✊
Rest in peace, Louise.
"The axiom is that the mark of poetic intelligence or vocation is passion
for language, which is thought to mean delirious response to language’s smallest communicative unit: to the word. The poet is supposed to be the person who can’t get enough of words like “incarnadine.” This was not my experience. From the time, at four or five or six, I first started reading poems, first thought of the poets I read as my companions, my predecessors —from the beginning I preferred the simplest vocabulary. What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words."
✊
Rest in peace, Louise.
June 12, 2016
I've been working on this book of essays intermittently for months. There have been moments of revelation, and moments of frustration too. Glück is not gifted in exposition, or in prose, for that matter; she admits as much, several times throughout this collection. In addition, she shares a number of views about poetry and art that I simply find unbearable. All the same, there are some essays in this book that I would consider essential, at least for makers of a certain disposition. And even where her idiosyncrasies as a writer reveal themselves too clearly for the words to be treated as any kind of maxim (there are enough writerly maxims out there, if you ask me), these moments are particularly instructive when you turn back to Glück's work itself; we start to see how she got there. Not to mention, these peculiarities of the poet herself act as wonderful springboards from which to head in new directions. Or maybe the same directions, but with new verve: away from and towards privation.
December 30, 2013
Quite simply the best volume I read this year.
I had a love affair with Gluck and her works in 2012, slowly reading through her canon and being struck again and again by the sheer breadth and talent of her work. At some point I realized that Proofs and Theories was the collected book of her essays and lectures, and fell over myself to secure a copy.
It is a profound treatise on writing, and poetry, and being a poet. I learned so much, and bought it for myself anticipating the re-read, when I will learn all over again. I am very grateful to have discovered Gluck, because there is no other living poet who has so thoroughly resonated with me in my life.
I had a love affair with Gluck and her works in 2012, slowly reading through her canon and being struck again and again by the sheer breadth and talent of her work. At some point I realized that Proofs and Theories was the collected book of her essays and lectures, and fell over myself to secure a copy.
It is a profound treatise on writing, and poetry, and being a poet. I learned so much, and bought it for myself anticipating the re-read, when I will learn all over again. I am very grateful to have discovered Gluck, because there is no other living poet who has so thoroughly resonated with me in my life.
Read
September 5, 2025I obviously could not talk any better of her. My very first poem was written in 2020 — just when a guy I was dating from the Middle East left my house after visiting me and I felt empty. I was mad at myself and I was angry at the fact I “couldn’t give” back what he deserved. I needed a clinical diagnosis — if I was unable to “give love”, was I ever ready or going “to love”? Such questions I threw to myself without knowing neither an answer nor their meaning. I was also, presumably, unable to explain to anyone how I felt. Until I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and wrote my very first poem: “I Can’t Give”. I used this poem to make my first entry to an online blog that felt like cold stone (how did I dare to suddenly write (?) I asked myself) — although throughout the years, and only then, I would start appreciating what this remote online blog meant to me. Back then I wouldn’t declare or call myself to be a writer, even less a poet. For god’s sake, I was afraid of poetry back in school! I would never understand what poets from previous centuries meant — and I was always disappointed at that. It felt I was incapable of understanding what some of the greatest artists had to say about us, about life, about earth! Until… I read Louise Glück.
I will remember, solemnly, beginning to read “Faithful and Virtuous Night” just when I was back from a year abroad working in the humanitarian sector. During that period I was feeling completely lost about my next steps, and only when I read Glück’s first stanzas, I cried from the inside like a little boy. That was it. That was all I knew I had to know about poetry and about this author. She was embracing, and succinct, and elaborate but not in a giddy way. She was welcoming me to read her, to revive her. And from that moment on, I knew I had also a voice in poetry. Perhaps it was a cunning one, but a voice nonetheless. And I wrote poetry and I read her, every night.
This book of hers about essays on poetry is a step back from her own poetry. She doesn’t “sell” her voice but she takes your hand and talks about the questions she forms from some of the greatest poets of her time and the ones in the past as well (in conjunction with her own experience as a writer and poet, of course). As she says, she unboxes the mystic content of her comrades, inviting the reader to follow her bold but unerring reflections about what impoverishment means or morality within the various verses she analyses.
To me, Glück is not offering her perspective about poetry in this book, neither her fixed point of view. She writes about her hope within each poet and poem she has read — and in my opinion, that’s the emblem of her fate in our culture and human language; least to say in our literature as well.
This fate resounded so elaborately in my life, that thanks to her and “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, I am able to write as I please; freeing myself from any rule of art and keeping on searching my voice and artistic life, from which now I carry lovingly and in perfect balance with my personal desires. A life worth living. An internal peace I will not allow anyone nor anything to relinquish from me.
Thank you.
I will remember, solemnly, beginning to read “Faithful and Virtuous Night” just when I was back from a year abroad working in the humanitarian sector. During that period I was feeling completely lost about my next steps, and only when I read Glück’s first stanzas, I cried from the inside like a little boy. That was it. That was all I knew I had to know about poetry and about this author. She was embracing, and succinct, and elaborate but not in a giddy way. She was welcoming me to read her, to revive her. And from that moment on, I knew I had also a voice in poetry. Perhaps it was a cunning one, but a voice nonetheless. And I wrote poetry and I read her, every night.
This book of hers about essays on poetry is a step back from her own poetry. She doesn’t “sell” her voice but she takes your hand and talks about the questions she forms from some of the greatest poets of her time and the ones in the past as well (in conjunction with her own experience as a writer and poet, of course). As she says, she unboxes the mystic content of her comrades, inviting the reader to follow her bold but unerring reflections about what impoverishment means or morality within the various verses she analyses.
To me, Glück is not offering her perspective about poetry in this book, neither her fixed point of view. She writes about her hope within each poet and poem she has read — and in my opinion, that’s the emblem of her fate in our culture and human language; least to say in our literature as well.
This fate resounded so elaborately in my life, that thanks to her and “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, I am able to write as I please; freeing myself from any rule of art and keeping on searching my voice and artistic life, from which now I carry lovingly and in perfect balance with my personal desires. A life worth living. An internal peace I will not allow anyone nor anything to relinquish from me.
Thank you.
August 12, 2022
provides as much confusion and delight as when your actually-good postgrad professor goes off-tangent from the syllabus and starts going off around topics she's most passionate about.
i kind of found myself struggling to catch up in some essays since she writes with assumption that you've read all of Keats, Berryman, and William Wiliams already, among others.
thereby im grateful for occasions where she directly cites the lines she's referring to. she tells us her reading of the poems without telling us how she got there. to some, that's good because we are saved from a few more paragraphs (and you also rrally have to be an active, note-taking student), to others it's a lot of "Wait, what?" moments. for that matter i recommend this to people who've already read a lot of poetry and are looking to have their views challenged. this is not a particularly beginner-friendly book.
i found mysef highlighting a lot of passages tho. sometimes just noun phrases i can't explain to you myself but within context makes perfect sense: [the] onanistic torment of sexual exile 😳; prefer[ring the] recalcitrant mystery to hallucination 😲😲😲; the solitude of the apparenty marginal soul 🤒🤒🤒🤧.
i like her prescriptions of what she believes makes poems work. here in #ProofsAndTheories can be found essays on different aspects of good writing: ✔silence and disruptions in diction and form, ✔ inherent problems in utilizing "sincerity", ✔ when and how to invite and exclude the reader, etc.
I can't believe this is only 130+ pages. #LouiseGluck succeeds in covering a lot of ground within a short amount of time. she's very eloquent though again writes more perhaps for other poets than the average readers of poems. or could be im just dumb! 💖👌🏼💥💥💥
i kind of found myself struggling to catch up in some essays since she writes with assumption that you've read all of Keats, Berryman, and William Wiliams already, among others.
thereby im grateful for occasions where she directly cites the lines she's referring to. she tells us her reading of the poems without telling us how she got there. to some, that's good because we are saved from a few more paragraphs (and you also rrally have to be an active, note-taking student), to others it's a lot of "Wait, what?" moments. for that matter i recommend this to people who've already read a lot of poetry and are looking to have their views challenged. this is not a particularly beginner-friendly book.
i found mysef highlighting a lot of passages tho. sometimes just noun phrases i can't explain to you myself but within context makes perfect sense: [the] onanistic torment of sexual exile 😳; prefer[ring the] recalcitrant mystery to hallucination 😲😲😲; the solitude of the apparenty marginal soul 🤒🤒🤒🤧.
i like her prescriptions of what she believes makes poems work. here in #ProofsAndTheories can be found essays on different aspects of good writing: ✔silence and disruptions in diction and form, ✔ inherent problems in utilizing "sincerity", ✔ when and how to invite and exclude the reader, etc.
I can't believe this is only 130+ pages. #LouiseGluck succeeds in covering a lot of ground within a short amount of time. she's very eloquent though again writes more perhaps for other poets than the average readers of poems. or could be im just dumb! 💖👌🏼💥💥💥
January 20, 2025
"What I share with my friends is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied."
June 21, 2025
I liked how she described Eliot and Prufrock a lot but I felt like there wasn’t a lot of substance here for me — disjointed and obscured, but not in a suggestive way. She’s awesome though. I especially enjoyed how many wondrous words of awe and appreciation she used.
I thought more about it. I think Glück fundamentally believes that poetry is about audience (especially as described in “The Idea of Courage”) and I disagree. Her ideas about writing with an idealized listener discounts the idea of writing the unknown; I think the self can be a listener, which creates the self as present and future, both shame feeling and generating.
I thought more about it. I think Glück fundamentally believes that poetry is about audience (especially as described in “The Idea of Courage”) and I disagree. Her ideas about writing with an idealized listener discounts the idea of writing the unknown; I think the self can be a listener, which creates the self as present and future, both shame feeling and generating.
June 22, 2025
I enjoyed very much several of these essays—the essay on education and the final speech transcription in particular were standouts. However, I was disappointed by the treatment of a few of the essays on a particular set of poems—half of it was applicable out of the specific context of the work in question, but the other half really should’ve had the original poems reprinted alongside the text (a difficultly in publishing I know, but if you can’t do it, perhaps don’t release the selection with those essays included). She’s a singular and brilliant voice though, I’m glad I read this.
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December 31, 2023doesn’t feel real that this is the last of her works i may ever read? special to be able to take comfort after her passing in the words she wrote 30 years before. for me there’s no poetry sharper 💔
“poems do not endure as objects but as presences. when you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.”
“the advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.”
“poems do not endure as objects but as presences. when you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit.”
“the advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.”
September 11, 2024
Some really excellent stuff here. Glück’s prose is dense - a poet addressing other poets - requiring the same steady patience and reflection as her poetry. The parts I could unpick felt so true as to be obvious.
My only complaint is that these essays are evidently assembled post-hoc from disparate sources divorced from which some lose all context, e.g. a piece on “Night Song” was completely lost on me as the poem was not included in the text and I could not find it online.
My only complaint is that these essays are evidently assembled post-hoc from disparate sources divorced from which some lose all context, e.g. a piece on “Night Song” was completely lost on me as the poem was not included in the text and I could not find it online.
July 31, 2020
One to come back to, and to have a lot of energy and sharpness of mind to engage with (from my perspective). Expects you to KEEP UP. Rewards attention, more generously.
January 5, 2021
I actually find this book of essays about poetry to be more "poetic" than any of her books of poems.
October 2, 2021
I’m not big on poetry. I’ll admit I’m not past reading them to establish some padding in Goodreads’ reading goal haha. But this shook me.
Glück switches between the role of counselor and professor. I can hear how profound her voice must sound in my head. When she talked about most poets here, I felt like I could easily imagine her as a distant woman in the same room going on about her other socialite friends and just leaving me in awe, even if I didn’t know those people. I was slightly proved wrong. She didn’t spend the book lecturing me about proofs and theories, but rather she somehow made me feel like a part of the conversation. A dreamer instead of a watcher, if you will.
I don’t know if it’s going to get me writing any more serious poetry soon, but she put into words a lot of what I’ve been worrying about with my own creative process that I couldn’t even properly think into existence.
One day, I’ll read works by everyone she’s mentioned here then come back to her meaty chapters about them. That day is not today haha, but I’m nonetheless a little bit of a changed person.
Glück switches between the role of counselor and professor. I can hear how profound her voice must sound in my head. When she talked about most poets here, I felt like I could easily imagine her as a distant woman in the same room going on about her other socialite friends and just leaving me in awe, even if I didn’t know those people. I was slightly proved wrong. She didn’t spend the book lecturing me about proofs and theories, but rather she somehow made me feel like a part of the conversation. A dreamer instead of a watcher, if you will.
I don’t know if it’s going to get me writing any more serious poetry soon, but she put into words a lot of what I’ve been worrying about with my own creative process that I couldn’t even properly think into existence.
One day, I’ll read works by everyone she’s mentioned here then come back to her meaty chapters about them. That day is not today haha, but I’m nonetheless a little bit of a changed person.
Read
July 20, 2023new guidebook for reading poems but wowowow dense forever to get through. will read again and again as i read the poems mentioned. i had a friend say louise was cruel, and i understand it now - but there's opportunity for renewal in desolation, at least we have to believe. thinking of her eliot essay - and how difficult it is to live locating truth in permanence. also a fun poem i read today written from the perspective of an onion by sue kwock kim that will forever be tied to the memory of finally finishing this book - "Is this the way you move through life, your mind / A questing knife, driven by your fantasy of truth, / Of lasting union—slashing away skin after skin / From things, ruin and tears your only signs / Of progress?" yes, says louise.
January 28, 2025
I enjoyed the essays some are denser than others. The ones about her own education, childhood, the creative process and the power of unfinished art were my favorite. Other essays I could not follow as well not being familiar with all the poets she mentions. I came away with many things to ponder, more poets to read and a better understanding of why I like Gluck's poetry.
December 20, 2024
This was a bit disappointing to read. This is perhaps because I’ve misunderstood the purpose of literary criticism. I’ve came to this genre looking for deepening my understanding about some topic at large (e.g., intersubjectivity, language, eros, etc), which I expect the author will give the reader by virtue of communicating what their engagement with certain poets or artists has given to them, regarding such understanding.
Gluck certainly doesn’t do that. While there are some interesting points made, Gluck writes in a non-straightforward way. Over my reading experience, I had the impression that she prefers grammatical constructions which give off the sheen of academic learnedness, as opposed to simply saying what she means. Doing this may serve a purpose beyond coming off as legitimate. It also allows for obscuring one’s actual points and for writing pages upon pages without advancing one’s actual points.
This impression might be unfair. Maybe the purpose of literary criticism is to just nudge us into some general position of emotion or feeling which can serve as a new frame of mind for when we go into engaging with these artists ourselves. Maybe I would be able to see Gluck’s brilliance if I read carefully the poets Gluck talks about after reading her essays. I’m not sure.
Here are some examples of what Gluck is up to, which frustrated me. One essay may be devoted to making as simple of a point as that both Williams Carlos Williams and T.S. Elliot’s poetries are speech-like, and they differ with regards to that Williams’s writing is as if there is not a particular conversational partner that the speaker of the poems is attending to and addressing, while Elliot’s is more focused in this way. This is a very nice point. But then Gluck goes on not adding anything new to this basic claim. She goes on about how she read these poets as a child and saw what they were up to; states baldly how she loves them; etc.
Here’s another example. In assessing Frank Bidart under an essay whose aim is to compare different poets’s treatments of “the forbidden,” Gluck simply says of his poetry that it speaks of the erotic and characterizes it in terms of “the creation of a non-thing, an erasure, a wound, the inflicting of damage that will not heal.” What is the purpose of stringing together four descriptions which are roughly synonymous? In the context of poetry and fiction, adding different and close descriptions like this can be critical for bringing the reader into a certain position in the imagination, where things click and speak to one in an important way. But in the context of nonfiction, where Gluck is purporting to make claims about the world (viz., certain poets and their poems), this way of writing, for me at least, only communicates that Gluck has certain intuitions or simple claims about poetry, and she is not interested in unpacking them or elaborating upon them as to further understanding. In reading a string of rough synonyms, for example, it can feel vivid as fiction and poetry can, but then once we’re done reading the essay and think about what we’ve learned, there’s nothing there to be articulated, since that feeling didn’t amount to any content that could be talked about and used in further reasoning.
Take an example of the non-straightforward or unclear way Gluck writes (there are many like this and I’ve chosen a random one). “Art’s truth is as different from sincerity’s honest disclosure as it is different from the truth we get in the doctors office, that sequence of knowns which the doctor… makes wholly available, adoring, in the process, glimpses into… the world of action transposed to conditions in which action can do only so much.” Why not just say “there are two distinct forms of truthfulness found between fictional and nonfictional contexts; namely, the truthfulness of fiction is found in how it changes how we perceive the world. This is especially important when we’re in a situation where we’re helpless, or where our action is impossible or inappropriate.”
Under the context of nonfiction, is there anything gained in writing in the more roundabout way? Is there anything lost in being explicit about what one means? Obviously we should “show don’t tell” in fiction, and I wonder why this should extend to nonfiction. I guess, as I mentioned above, I’ve mistaken the purpose of literary criticism; it’s not supposed to convey information about some topic, which the literature speaks to.
This thought leads to another problem, however. Is writing in a roundabout way particularly helpful for positioning one to be able to return to the poem or text and see new things in it, by virtue of having engaged with the literary criticism? This is probably a context-dependent matter. Maybe it depends upon a reader’s personality (it’s obvious that I prefer clarity in nonfiction). Maybe it also depends upon whether the new insights ideally to be had once one returns to the poem require one’s being in a certain emotional state, which can be better invoked in one by “unclear” writing, as opposed to explicit statements.
Gluck certainly doesn’t do that. While there are some interesting points made, Gluck writes in a non-straightforward way. Over my reading experience, I had the impression that she prefers grammatical constructions which give off the sheen of academic learnedness, as opposed to simply saying what she means. Doing this may serve a purpose beyond coming off as legitimate. It also allows for obscuring one’s actual points and for writing pages upon pages without advancing one’s actual points.
This impression might be unfair. Maybe the purpose of literary criticism is to just nudge us into some general position of emotion or feeling which can serve as a new frame of mind for when we go into engaging with these artists ourselves. Maybe I would be able to see Gluck’s brilliance if I read carefully the poets Gluck talks about after reading her essays. I’m not sure.
Here are some examples of what Gluck is up to, which frustrated me. One essay may be devoted to making as simple of a point as that both Williams Carlos Williams and T.S. Elliot’s poetries are speech-like, and they differ with regards to that Williams’s writing is as if there is not a particular conversational partner that the speaker of the poems is attending to and addressing, while Elliot’s is more focused in this way. This is a very nice point. But then Gluck goes on not adding anything new to this basic claim. She goes on about how she read these poets as a child and saw what they were up to; states baldly how she loves them; etc.
Here’s another example. In assessing Frank Bidart under an essay whose aim is to compare different poets’s treatments of “the forbidden,” Gluck simply says of his poetry that it speaks of the erotic and characterizes it in terms of “the creation of a non-thing, an erasure, a wound, the inflicting of damage that will not heal.” What is the purpose of stringing together four descriptions which are roughly synonymous? In the context of poetry and fiction, adding different and close descriptions like this can be critical for bringing the reader into a certain position in the imagination, where things click and speak to one in an important way. But in the context of nonfiction, where Gluck is purporting to make claims about the world (viz., certain poets and their poems), this way of writing, for me at least, only communicates that Gluck has certain intuitions or simple claims about poetry, and she is not interested in unpacking them or elaborating upon them as to further understanding. In reading a string of rough synonyms, for example, it can feel vivid as fiction and poetry can, but then once we’re done reading the essay and think about what we’ve learned, there’s nothing there to be articulated, since that feeling didn’t amount to any content that could be talked about and used in further reasoning.
Take an example of the non-straightforward or unclear way Gluck writes (there are many like this and I’ve chosen a random one). “Art’s truth is as different from sincerity’s honest disclosure as it is different from the truth we get in the doctors office, that sequence of knowns which the doctor… makes wholly available, adoring, in the process, glimpses into… the world of action transposed to conditions in which action can do only so much.” Why not just say “there are two distinct forms of truthfulness found between fictional and nonfictional contexts; namely, the truthfulness of fiction is found in how it changes how we perceive the world. This is especially important when we’re in a situation where we’re helpless, or where our action is impossible or inappropriate.”
Under the context of nonfiction, is there anything gained in writing in the more roundabout way? Is there anything lost in being explicit about what one means? Obviously we should “show don’t tell” in fiction, and I wonder why this should extend to nonfiction. I guess, as I mentioned above, I’ve mistaken the purpose of literary criticism; it’s not supposed to convey information about some topic, which the literature speaks to.
This thought leads to another problem, however. Is writing in a roundabout way particularly helpful for positioning one to be able to return to the poem or text and see new things in it, by virtue of having engaged with the literary criticism? This is probably a context-dependent matter. Maybe it depends upon a reader’s personality (it’s obvious that I prefer clarity in nonfiction). Maybe it also depends upon whether the new insights ideally to be had once one returns to the poem require one’s being in a certain emotional state, which can be better invoked in one by “unclear” writing, as opposed to explicit statements.
March 8, 2008
Brilliant. "So rarely can a poet speak eloquently about their craft."
September 9, 2025
In this dense little collection of essays, Glück's voice shines most for me when she writes personally, vulnerably, in comments on her own life and its reading and writing. Two such key moments:
And on that note, where this collection fell far, far short for me was when she, despite avowing an "uneas[iness] with commentary," makes bold, sweeping, privilege-laden judgments on what makes a "good" poem, or an "effective" reader, or a "lasting" work of art, etc etc. Of course, all of her artist touchstones are white and cisgender, and nearly all are male and heterosexual. This is a white, white list of her essential canon. She seems to thrive when making her voice as distanced-white-male as possible in chorus to these key figures of hers.
Not only are universal judgments about art impossible, but coming from such an insightful poet as Glück, they feel disingenuous and very, very dated - particularly when almost the only essay engaging in extended critique of other poets/poems is "The Forbidden," where she rails against the work of Linda McCarriston and Sharon Olds. I'm not personally a fan of either McCarriston or Olds, but it was embarrassing to see how devoted Glück was to upholding white cis-het male standards in how she critiqued these two women while dedicating essay after essay to various (white, cis, het, economically privileged, etc) male writers/artists who have inspired her.
Not surprising at all that the TOC for Best American Poetry 1993 - she includes her editorial intro in this collection - is so white, largely male, and includes many of her mentor-friends that she dedicates essays to here.
So, gorgeous poetry, which I'll return to, but deeply frustrating and disenchanting prose, which I won't.
"The tragedy of anorexia seems to me that its intent is not self-destructive, though its outcome so often is. Its intent is to construct, in the only way possible when means are so limited, a plausible self. But the sustained act, the repudiation, designed to distinguish the self from the other also separates self and body. Out of terror at its incompleteness and ravenous need, anorexia constructs a physical sign calculated to manifest disdain for need, for hunger, designed to appear completely free of all forms of dependency, to appear complete, self-contained. But the sign it trusts is a physical sign, impossible to sustain by mere act of will, and the poignance of the metaphor rests in this: that anorexia proves not the soul’s superiority to but its dependence on flesh." (Education of the Poet, pp. 10-11)
"I have to say at once that I am uneasy with commentary. My insights on what I perceive to be the themes of this poem are already expressed: the poem embodies them. I can’t add anything; what I can do is make the implicit explicit, which exactly reverses the poet’s ambition." (The Dreamer and the Watcher, p. 99)
And on that note, where this collection fell far, far short for me was when she, despite avowing an "uneas[iness] with commentary," makes bold, sweeping, privilege-laden judgments on what makes a "good" poem, or an "effective" reader, or a "lasting" work of art, etc etc. Of course, all of her artist touchstones are white and cisgender, and nearly all are male and heterosexual. This is a white, white list of her essential canon. She seems to thrive when making her voice as distanced-white-male as possible in chorus to these key figures of hers.
Not only are universal judgments about art impossible, but coming from such an insightful poet as Glück, they feel disingenuous and very, very dated - particularly when almost the only essay engaging in extended critique of other poets/poems is "The Forbidden," where she rails against the work of Linda McCarriston and Sharon Olds. I'm not personally a fan of either McCarriston or Olds, but it was embarrassing to see how devoted Glück was to upholding white cis-het male standards in how she critiqued these two women while dedicating essay after essay to various (white, cis, het, economically privileged, etc) male writers/artists who have inspired her.
Not surprising at all that the TOC for Best American Poetry 1993 - she includes her editorial intro in this collection - is so white, largely male, and includes many of her mentor-friends that she dedicates essays to here.
So, gorgeous poetry, which I'll return to, but deeply frustrating and disenchanting prose, which I won't.
December 11, 2021
The greatest virtue of this collection of essays is Louise Glück's honesty. She lets us into the confines of her mind and her style. She speaks freely -- disarmingly even -- of her periods of impoverishment when she struggled to write, well or at all. Her view on what counts as great poetry is provocative and debatable. It is, naturally, connected to the way she writes herself, with austerity and precision, leaving silence and hesitation to speak more than words.
Readers of Glück's poetry will notice a mathematical simplicity to her lines. Poems begin with propositions and investigate the nature of the subject in a sparse style. These essays confirm Glück's affinity to the science metaphor. She exhorts poets to free themselves of bias no matter what the subject of exploration. Poets should be scientists. She talks of the need for a poet to "illuminate what is hidden." She asks the poet to excavate the truth through the poem but strongly disdains biography. The subjective particulars cannot endure.
I see Glück's point but it is also true that her poetry is the product of a unique privilege. To let the poem experiment, for the poem not to desire a concrete outcome, or to inspire, is only possible in a world where your everyday existence is unchallenged. Things are linear then; poetry can choose mystery in place of explicit purpose. Glück inhabits a unique period in her land's history where this privilege is unencumbered. But poetry can, must, be more. It can be political. It can be biographical. And it will retain its power albeit in a different manner.
The essays include many works of criticism and comparative study. Elegantly written, they are very enjoyable and illuminating. The collection also functions as memoir. There are snapshots all the way, from childhood amateur taking first stabs at verse to mature prominent poet curating the best poetry published in 1993. A poignant tribute to her teacher, Stanley Kunitz, particularly stands out.
If there is one common thread through these essays, it's one word: yearning. That's the engine behind Glück's Art, and captures, in her trademark style, books worth of advice for the young artist.
"I love white space, love the telling omission, love lacunae, and find oddly depressing that which seems to have left out nothing."
Readers of Glück's poetry will notice a mathematical simplicity to her lines. Poems begin with propositions and investigate the nature of the subject in a sparse style. These essays confirm Glück's affinity to the science metaphor. She exhorts poets to free themselves of bias no matter what the subject of exploration. Poets should be scientists. She talks of the need for a poet to "illuminate what is hidden." She asks the poet to excavate the truth through the poem but strongly disdains biography. The subjective particulars cannot endure.
I see Glück's point but it is also true that her poetry is the product of a unique privilege. To let the poem experiment, for the poem not to desire a concrete outcome, or to inspire, is only possible in a world where your everyday existence is unchallenged. Things are linear then; poetry can choose mystery in place of explicit purpose. Glück inhabits a unique period in her land's history where this privilege is unencumbered. But poetry can, must, be more. It can be political. It can be biographical. And it will retain its power albeit in a different manner.
The essays include many works of criticism and comparative study. Elegantly written, they are very enjoyable and illuminating. The collection also functions as memoir. There are snapshots all the way, from childhood amateur taking first stabs at verse to mature prominent poet curating the best poetry published in 1993. A poignant tribute to her teacher, Stanley Kunitz, particularly stands out.
If there is one common thread through these essays, it's one word: yearning. That's the engine behind Glück's Art, and captures, in her trademark style, books worth of advice for the young artist.
Read
February 2, 2011from The Idea of Courage:
"For poets, speech and fluency seem less an act of courage than a state of grace. The intervals of silence, however, require a stoicism very like courage; of these, no reader is aware."
from Against Sincerity:
"There is, unfortunately, no test for truth. That is, in part, why artists suffer. The love of truth is felt as chronic aspiration and chronic unease. . . . It is relatively easy to say that truth is the aim and heart of poetry, but harder to say how it is recognized or made. We know it first, as readers, by its result, by the sudden rush of wonder and awe and terror."
"We incline, in our anxiety for formulas, to be literal: we scan Frost's face compulsively for hidden kindness, having found the poems to be, by all reports, so much better than the man. This assumes our poems are our fingerprints, which they are not. And the process by which experience is changed--heightened, distilled, made memorable--have nothing to do with sincerity. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned."
"The true, in poetry, is felt as insight. it is very rare, but beside it other poems seem merely intelligent comment."
from Disruption, Hesitation, Silence:
"When [Oppen's?] poems are difficult, it is often because their silences are complicated, hard to follow. For me, the answer to such moments is not more language.
"What I am advocating is, of course, the opposite of Keats's dream of filling rifts with ore. The dream of abundance does not need another defense. The danger of that aesthetic is its tendency to produce, in lesser hands, work that is all detail and no shape. Meanwhile, economy is not admired. Economy depends on systematic withholdings of the gratuitous . . ."
from The Best AMerican Poetry 1993: Introduction:
"By voice I mean t he style of thought, for which a style of speech--the clever grafts and borrowings, the habitual gestures scattered like clues in the lines--never convincingly substitutes. We fall back on that term, voice, for all its insufficiencies; it suggests, at least, the sound of an authentic being. Although such sound may draw on the poet's actual manner of speech, it is not, on the page, transcription. The voice is at liberty to excerpt, to exaggerate, to bypass what it chooses, to issue from conditions the real world will never exactly reproduce; unlike speech, it bears no immediate social pressure, since the other to whom it strives to make itself clear may not yet exist. The poem means to create that person, first in the poet, then in the reader."
". . . an intuition that poems must be autobiography (since they are not description) unnerves the reader for whom the actual and the true are synonyms. // Poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response. Moreover, a body of work may change and develop less in reacation to the lived life than in reaction to the poet's prior discoveries, or the discoveries of others. if a poem remains so selectively amplified, so casual with fact, as to seem elusive, we must remember its agenda: not simply to record the actual but to continuously create the sensation of immersion in the actual. And if, in its striving to be free of the imprisoning self, the poet's gaze trains itself outward, it rests nevertheless on what compels or arrests it. Such choices constitute a portrait. Where the gaze is held, voice, or repsonse, begins. Always in what follows the poet is alert, resistant, resisting dogma and fashion, resisting the greater danger of personal conviction, which must be held in suspicion, given its resemblance to dogma."
"Art is not a sevice. Or, rather, it does not reliably serve all people in a standardized way. Its service is to the spirit, from which it removes the misery of inertia. It does this by refocusing an existing image of the world; in this sense, it is less mirror than microscope--where the flat white of the page was, a field of energy emerges. Nevertheless, the absence of social function or social usefulness sometimes combines in the poet with a desire to seve, to do good: this absence and this pressure direct the poet toward the didactic. . . . But to make vital art, the poet must foreswear this alliance, however desperately it is sought, since what it produces is reiteration. Which is to say, not perception but he sensation of perception's endurance. And what is inevitably missing from such echoes is the sense of speech issuing in the moment from a specific, identifiable voice; what is missing is the sense of immediacy, volatility, which gives these voices their paradoxical durability. Whatever the nature of these voices, . . . insight, as they speak it, feels like shocking event: wholly absent and then inevitable."
"Hierarchy dissolves passionate fellowship into bitter watchfulness--those who aren't vulnerable to this are usually those who are regularly honored. What is essential is that we sustain our readiness to learn from each other, a readiness which, by definition, requires from each of us the best work possible. We must, I think, fear whatever erodes the generosity on which exacting criticism depends."
from The Dreamer and the Watcher:
"Among the residual gifts of love is a composure, an openness to all experience, so profound it amounts to an acceptance of death. Or, more accurately, the future is no longer necessary. One is not rash, neither is one paralyzed by conservation or hope. Simply, the sense of having lived, of having known one's fate, is very strong."
"Major experiences vary in form--what reader and writer learn to do is recognize analogies."
from On Stanley Kunitz:
"The poems were spread across his desk. I was standing in the doorway, from which distance they seemed quite impressive, unquestionably numerous, definitely printed with actual words. What Kunitz said was, 'Of course, they're awful.' And then, 'But you know that.' . . .
"The turn was this: Kunitz remarked, quite casually, that this didn't matter, hat I was a poet. What he meant, I think was something more precise, conservative and liberating, a concept wholly new to me. Not that the poems were of any worth, but that they did not constitute, despite their number, a prophecy.
". . . He had done two things: paid me the compliment of speaking the truth, and afforded me the opportunity to follow suit. To learn through experience. Or, more accurately, to affirm a lost perception--what I had felt writing, and in psychoanalysis. That whatever the truth is, to speak it is a great adventure."
"For poets, speech and fluency seem less an act of courage than a state of grace. The intervals of silence, however, require a stoicism very like courage; of these, no reader is aware."
from Against Sincerity:
"There is, unfortunately, no test for truth. That is, in part, why artists suffer. The love of truth is felt as chronic aspiration and chronic unease. . . . It is relatively easy to say that truth is the aim and heart of poetry, but harder to say how it is recognized or made. We know it first, as readers, by its result, by the sudden rush of wonder and awe and terror."
"We incline, in our anxiety for formulas, to be literal: we scan Frost's face compulsively for hidden kindness, having found the poems to be, by all reports, so much better than the man. This assumes our poems are our fingerprints, which they are not. And the process by which experience is changed--heightened, distilled, made memorable--have nothing to do with sincerity. The truth, on the page, need not have been lived. It is, instead, all that can be envisioned."
"The true, in poetry, is felt as insight. it is very rare, but beside it other poems seem merely intelligent comment."
from Disruption, Hesitation, Silence:
"When [Oppen's?] poems are difficult, it is often because their silences are complicated, hard to follow. For me, the answer to such moments is not more language.
"What I am advocating is, of course, the opposite of Keats's dream of filling rifts with ore. The dream of abundance does not need another defense. The danger of that aesthetic is its tendency to produce, in lesser hands, work that is all detail and no shape. Meanwhile, economy is not admired. Economy depends on systematic withholdings of the gratuitous . . ."
from The Best AMerican Poetry 1993: Introduction:
"By voice I mean t he style of thought, for which a style of speech--the clever grafts and borrowings, the habitual gestures scattered like clues in the lines--never convincingly substitutes. We fall back on that term, voice, for all its insufficiencies; it suggests, at least, the sound of an authentic being. Although such sound may draw on the poet's actual manner of speech, it is not, on the page, transcription. The voice is at liberty to excerpt, to exaggerate, to bypass what it chooses, to issue from conditions the real world will never exactly reproduce; unlike speech, it bears no immediate social pressure, since the other to whom it strives to make itself clear may not yet exist. The poem means to create that person, first in the poet, then in the reader."
". . . an intuition that poems must be autobiography (since they are not description) unnerves the reader for whom the actual and the true are synonyms. // Poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response. Moreover, a body of work may change and develop less in reacation to the lived life than in reaction to the poet's prior discoveries, or the discoveries of others. if a poem remains so selectively amplified, so casual with fact, as to seem elusive, we must remember its agenda: not simply to record the actual but to continuously create the sensation of immersion in the actual. And if, in its striving to be free of the imprisoning self, the poet's gaze trains itself outward, it rests nevertheless on what compels or arrests it. Such choices constitute a portrait. Where the gaze is held, voice, or repsonse, begins. Always in what follows the poet is alert, resistant, resisting dogma and fashion, resisting the greater danger of personal conviction, which must be held in suspicion, given its resemblance to dogma."
"Art is not a sevice. Or, rather, it does not reliably serve all people in a standardized way. Its service is to the spirit, from which it removes the misery of inertia. It does this by refocusing an existing image of the world; in this sense, it is less mirror than microscope--where the flat white of the page was, a field of energy emerges. Nevertheless, the absence of social function or social usefulness sometimes combines in the poet with a desire to seve, to do good: this absence and this pressure direct the poet toward the didactic. . . . But to make vital art, the poet must foreswear this alliance, however desperately it is sought, since what it produces is reiteration. Which is to say, not perception but he sensation of perception's endurance. And what is inevitably missing from such echoes is the sense of speech issuing in the moment from a specific, identifiable voice; what is missing is the sense of immediacy, volatility, which gives these voices their paradoxical durability. Whatever the nature of these voices, . . . insight, as they speak it, feels like shocking event: wholly absent and then inevitable."
"Hierarchy dissolves passionate fellowship into bitter watchfulness--those who aren't vulnerable to this are usually those who are regularly honored. What is essential is that we sustain our readiness to learn from each other, a readiness which, by definition, requires from each of us the best work possible. We must, I think, fear whatever erodes the generosity on which exacting criticism depends."
from The Dreamer and the Watcher:
"Among the residual gifts of love is a composure, an openness to all experience, so profound it amounts to an acceptance of death. Or, more accurately, the future is no longer necessary. One is not rash, neither is one paralyzed by conservation or hope. Simply, the sense of having lived, of having known one's fate, is very strong."
"Major experiences vary in form--what reader and writer learn to do is recognize analogies."
from On Stanley Kunitz:
"The poems were spread across his desk. I was standing in the doorway, from which distance they seemed quite impressive, unquestionably numerous, definitely printed with actual words. What Kunitz said was, 'Of course, they're awful.' And then, 'But you know that.' . . .
"The turn was this: Kunitz remarked, quite casually, that this didn't matter, hat I was a poet. What he meant, I think was something more precise, conservative and liberating, a concept wholly new to me. Not that the poems were of any worth, but that they did not constitute, despite their number, a prophecy.
". . . He had done two things: paid me the compliment of speaking the truth, and afforded me the opportunity to follow suit. To learn through experience. Or, more accurately, to affirm a lost perception--what I had felt writing, and in psychoanalysis. That whatever the truth is, to speak it is a great adventure."
Read
August 18, 2020- look up the dream songs and Rilke’s Apollo and love song of Alred Prufrock
- P12-13 “the longer I withheld conclusion, the more I saw”
- P73, 74, 75 “a master of not saying”, P77 “guilt explains flight. But so, too, does an ancient wish to protect a very fragile self” also “he should have. He didn’t.”
- P80 Street name, 81 sanity, 82 “linguistic satiation” “WHY I SHOULD BE MORE PATIENT”, 83-84 scared to act*
- P131-132 poem and discourse on improvement
- P85 “the danger of the expansive poem is that the tension is lost”
- 85 80 7
- 17 “Each book I’ve written has culminated in a conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off.” Writing books and breaking patterns
- voids - spicer
- “At the same time, interior paralysis magnified external vitality: all around, other people seem enviably caught up in, animated by feeling.” 130
- ending: gratitude
- P12-13 “the longer I withheld conclusion, the more I saw”
- P73, 74, 75 “a master of not saying”, P77 “guilt explains flight. But so, too, does an ancient wish to protect a very fragile self” also “he should have. He didn’t.”
- P80 Street name, 81 sanity, 82 “linguistic satiation” “WHY I SHOULD BE MORE PATIENT”, 83-84 scared to act*
- P131-132 poem and discourse on improvement
- P85 “the danger of the expansive poem is that the tension is lost”
- 85 80 7
- 17 “Each book I’ve written has culminated in a conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off.” Writing books and breaking patterns
- voids - spicer
- “At the same time, interior paralysis magnified external vitality: all around, other people seem enviably caught up in, animated by feeling.” 130
- ending: gratitude
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