WHEN SAUL BELLOWwon the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1976, he commented: “The
child in me is delighted. The adult in me is
skeptical.” Bellow saw a “secret humilia-
tion” in the fact that “some of the very great
writers of the century didn’t get it.”
Louise Glück, who won the prize on
Thursday, has long been skeptical of praise
as well. In a 2009 interview, she said:
“When I’m told I have a large readership, I
think, ‘Oh great, I’m going to turn out to be
Longfellow’: someone easy to understand,
easy to like, the kind of diluted experience
available to many. And I don’t want to be
Longfellow. Sorry, Henry, but I don’t. To the
degree that I apprehend acclaim, I think,
‘Ah, it’s a flaw in the work.’ ”
Glück — her surname rhymes with
“click,” not “cluck” — is not the new Longfel-
low. Yet it’s part of her greatness that her
poems are relatively easy of access while
impossible to utterly get to the bottom of.
They have echoing meanings; you can tan-
gle with them for a very long time.
I have argued, in these pages, that her
1990 book, “Ararat,” is the most brutal and
sorrow-filled book of poetry published in
the last 30 years. (It’s contained in her col-
lection “Poems: 1962-2012.”) It’s confes-
sional and a bit wild, I wrote, comparing it to
Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.”
One of the things to love about Glück’s po-
etry is that, while her work contains many
emotional registers, she is not afraid to be
cruel — she confronts the monsters in her-
self, and in others, not with resignation and
therapeutic digression but with artery-
nicking knives.
The poet Kay Ryan, in her terrific new
book of essays, “Synthesizing Gravity,”
writes: “I think it’s good to admit what a
wolfish thing art is; I trust writers who
know they aren’t nice.” Glück’s work is re-
plete with not-niceness. You would not, you
sense, want her as an enemy.A Poet Who Confronts the Monsters in Us
Louise Glück, who
received this year’s Nobel
Prize in Literature.KATHERINE WOLKOFFLouise Glück, a new Nobel
laureate, isn’t afraid to use
her work to explore cruelty.
DWIGHT GARNER AN APPRAISALCONTINUED ON PAGE C6SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020C1
YNEWS CRITICISM
4 TELEVISION
Tooth-achingly-sweet comfort
viewing. BY SCOTT BRYAN
5 FILM REVIEW
Shocking! It’s Halloween in
Salem. BY BEN KENIGSBERG
2 THEATERParsing a selection
of scenes from
‘Angels in America.’
BY JESSE GREENFor years, Black trustees at the country’s
art museums have been talking to one an-
other. They share their frustrations at being
the only Black faces in board meetings.
They exchange ideas about how to help re-
cruit more Black directors, to collect more
Black artists, to cultivate more Black cura-
tors.
Now, in an effort to formalize those con-
versations and facilitate meaningful
change amid the Black Lives Matter move-
ment, several of those trustees have banded
together to form the Black Trustee Alliance
for Art Museums.
“This is a different moment,” said Pamela
J. Joyner, a member of the alliance’s steer-
ing committee who is a trustee at the Getty
Trust, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the
Tate Americas Foundation. “I don’t see any-
body who isn’t focused on moving a process
like this forward.”
The need for this type of organization, its
members say, was amplified most recently
by the decision by four museums to post-
pone a Philip Guston retrospective until
2024 because of its images of the Ku Klux
Klan. The announcement sparked a fierce
backlash in the art world, with critics of the
decision calling it self-censorship.
The institutions that organized the Gus-
ton exhibition — the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, the Tate Modern in London, and
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — have
said they postponed “until a time at which
we think that the powerful message of so-
cial and racial justice that is at the center of
Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly in-
terpreted.”
The National Gallery’s director, Kaywin
Feldman, told The Washington Post on
Wednesday that members of the gallery’s
staff, including guards, had voiced their ob-
jections to the show’s images and that “the
KKK images in Guston’s work are in a spe-
cial category of racial violence.” (She also
said the 2024 date was announced hastily
and she hoped the exhibition would open
sooner at her museum — in 2022 or 2023.)Black Trustees Form Alliance
To Diversify Art Museums
Weary of tokenism, the group’s
members are pushing for
institutional transformation.
By ROBIN POGREBINCONTINUED ON PAGE C4I love singing four-part harmony. It isn’t just
about the precision, the ringing sound when
voices blend together. It’s also about com-
munity, listening to one another and breath-
ing together, creating a mood-lifter and
balm in a fraught world.
But like theater and hand shaking, choral
singing has been canceled for now — and
for good reason. Singing is the AK-47 of ex-
pression in the coronavirus era, shooting
out so many aerosols that a church choir in
Washington made the news in March when
almost everyone present contracted the vi-
rus after a rehearsal; 53 singers became ill,
and two died.
When my men’s a cappella chorus on
Long Island turned to Zoom rehearsals in
the spring, I didn’t last long. The lag timeOne Concert
The Pandemic
Can’t Cancel
A choir member takes part in a drive-in rehearsal in Stow, Mass.SIMON SIMARD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESDrive-in technology can help
choruses rehearse in a waythat’s safe and satisfying.
By BOB MORRISCONTINUED ON PAGE C5THE ‘UNLIKELY’ LAUREATE
The American writer
Louise Glück talks about
poetry, aging and the
surprise of her Nobel Prize
in Literature. Page 6.