The New York Times - USA (2020-10-10)

“I’m a very sociable person,” the poet Lou-

ise Glück said early on in our interview.

“The fact that I dislike interviews doesn’t

mean I’m a recluse.”

Glück had been put in an uncomfortable

spot. On Thursday morning, she won the

Nobel Prize in Literature. Journalists were

lining the street outside her home in Cam-

bridge, Mass. Her phone hadn’t stopped

ringing since 7 a.m., an onslaught of atten-

tion she described as “nightmarish.”

By now, Glück should be accustomed to

acclaim. In a career that has lasted more

than five decades, she has published a doz-

en volumes of poetry and received virtually

every prestigious literary prize: the Na-

tional Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the

National Book Critics Circle Award and the

National Humanities Medal, among others.

She’s revered by literary critics and her

peers for her spare, direct and confessional

verses.

“Her work is like an inner conversation,”

said her longtime friend and editor, Jona-

than Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus

& Giroux. “Maybe she’s talking to herself,

maybe she’s talking to us. There’s a kind of

irony to it. One thing that’s very constant in

her work is that inner voice. She’s always

evaluating experience against some ideal

that it never matches.”

The past few months have been trying for

Glück, who is divorced and lives alone; she

was accustomed to dining out with friends

six nights a week before the pandemic. For

several months in the spring, she struggled

to write. Then, late this summer, she started

writing poems again and finished a new col-

lection, titled “Winter Recipes From the

Collective,” which FSG plans to release next

year.

“The hope is that if you live through it,

there will be art on the other side,” she said.

Glück spoke to The New York Times a

few hours after the news of her Nobel Prize

broke. Below are edited excerpts from the

conversation.

How did you first hear the news?

This morning I got a phone call at some-

thing like quarter to 7. I was just awake. A

man who introduced himself as the secre-

tary of the Swedish Academy, he said, “I’m

calling to tell you you’ve won the Nobel

Prize.” I can’t remember what I said, but it

had some suspicion in it.

I think I was unprepared.

How did you feel once you absorbed that it

was real?

Completely flabbergasted that they would

choose a white American lyric poet. It does-

n’t make sense. Now my street is covered

with journalists. People keep telling me how

humble I am. I’m not humble. But I thought,

I come from a country that is not thought

fondly of now, and I’m white, and we’ve had

all the prizes. So it seemed to be extremely

unlikely that I would ever have this particu-

lar event to deal with in my life.

What has your life been like during these

intense and isolating months during the

pandemic? Have you been able to write?

I write very erratically anyway, so it’s not a

steady discipline. I’ve been working on a

book for about four years that tormented

me. Then in late July and August, I unex-

pectedly wrote some new poems, and sud-

denly saw how I could shape this manu-

script and finish it. It was a miracle. The

usual feelings of euphoria and relief were

compromised by Covid, because I had to do

battle with my daily terror and the neces-

sary limitations on my daily life.

What is the new collection about?

Falling apart. There’s a lot of mourning in

the book. There’s also a lot of comedy in the

book, and the poems are very surreal.

I’ve written about death since I could

write. Literally when I was 10, I was writing

about death. Yeah, well, I was a lively girl.

Aging is more complicated. It isn’t simply

the fact that you’re drawn closer to your

death, it’s that faculties that you counted on

— physical grace and strength and mental

agility — these things are being compro-

mised or threatened. It’s been very interest-

ing to think about and write about.

A lot of your work draws on classical my-

thology and weaves together mythic

archetypes with more intimate contempo-

rary verses about family bonds and relation-

ships. What draws you to those mythic

figures, and how do those stories enhance

what you are trying to explore and commu-

nicate through your poetry?

Everybody who writes draws sustenance

and fuel from earliest memories, and the

things that changed you or touched you or

thrilled you in your childhood. I was read

the Greek myths by my visionary parents,

and when I could read on my own, I contin-

ued to read them. The figures of the gods

and heroes were more vivid to me than the

other little children on the block in Long Is-

land. It wasn’t as though I was drawing on

something acquired late in life to give my

work some kind of varnish of learning.

These were my bedtime stories. And cer-

tain stories particularly resonated with me,

especially Persephone, and I’ve been writ-

ing about her on and off for 50 years. And I

think I was as much caught up in a struggle

with my mother, as ambitious girls often

are. I think that particular myth gave a new

aspect to those struggles. I don’t mean it

was useful in my daily life. When I wrote,

instead of complaining about my mother, I

could complain about Demeter.

Some have compared your work to Sylvia

Plath and described your verses as confes-

sional and intimate. To what extent have you

drawn on your own experience in your work,

and to what extent are you exploring univer-

sal human themes?

You always draw on your own experience

because it’s the material of your life, start-

ing with your childhood. But I look for ar-

chetypal experience, and I assume that my

struggles and joys are not unique. They feel

unique as you experience them, but I’m not

interested in making the spotlight fall on

myself and my particular life, but instead on

the struggles and joys of humans, who are

born and then forced to exit. I think I write

about mortality because it was a terrible

shock to me to discover in childhood that

you don’t get this forever.

You’ve experimented with different poetic

forms in the course of your career, though

your voice has remained distinct. Has that

been a deliberate, conscious effort to push

yourself by trying different forms?

Yes, all the time. You’re writing to be an ad-

venturer. I want to be taken somewhere I

know nothing about. I want to be a stranger

to a territory. One of the few good things to

say about old age is that you have a new ex-

perience. Diminishment is not everybody’s

most anticipated joy, but there is news in

this situation. And that, for a poet or writer,

is invaluable. I think you have always to be

surprised and to be, in a way, a beginner

again, otherwise I would bore myself to

tears. And there have been times when I

have, when I’ve thought, you know, you

wrote that poem. It’s a very nice poem, but

you already wrote it.

In what ways do you feel aging has led you

to explore new territory as a poet?

You find yourself losing a noun here and

there, and your sentences develop these

vast lacunae in the middle, and you either

have to restructure the sentence or aban-

don it. But the point is, you see this, and it

has never happened before. And though it’s

grim and unpleasant and bodes ill, it’s still,

from the point of view of the artist, exciting

and new.

Your style has often been described as

spare and pared down. Is that the voice that

comes to you naturally when you write, or is

it something that you’ve developed and pol-

ished?

Pared down sometimes, yeah. Sometimes I

write conversationally. You don’t work on a

voice. The sentence finds a way to speak it-

self. This sounds so Delphic. It’s a hard

thing to discuss, a voice. I think I am fasci-

nated by syntax and always felt its power,

and the poems that moved me most greatly

were not the most verbally opulent. They

were the poets like Blake and Milton, whose

syntax was astonishing, the way emphasis

would be deployed.

You teach at Yale and have spoken about

how teaching has helped you through diffi-

culties you’ve confronted in your own writ-

ing. How has teaching shaped you as a writ-

er?

You’re constantly being bathed in the unex-

pected and the new. You have to rearrange

your ideas so that you can draw out of your

students what excites them. My students

amaze me; they dazzle me. Though I could-

n’t always write, I could always read other

people’s writing.

Thank you so much for your time. Is there

anything else that you’d like to add?

If you consider the fact that I started out by

wanting to mention nothing, and then I

talked my head off, no, I can’t think of any-

thing. Most of what I have to say of any real

urgency comes out in poems, and the rest is

just entertainment.

The Words Find

A Way to Speak

Louise Glück bares

inner conversations

about common

struggles and joys

and the ‘terrible

shock’ of mortality.

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

WEBB CHAPPELL

Louise Glück said she
was “completely
flabbergasted” after
winning the Nobel Prize
in Literature.

C6 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2020

As I write this, I have my copy of “Poems:
1962-2012” splayed out beside me on my
writing table. It’s pretty well marked up.
You can flip it open almost anywhere and
find flying shards of dark intellect and
beastly wit.
“You should take one of those chemi-
cals, / maybe you’d write more” is a charac-
teristic put-down. So is: “Your back is my
favorite part of you, / the part furthest
away from your mouth.” So is: “I expected
better of two creatures / who were given
minds.” Perhaps explaining such lines, she
has also written: “You show respect by
fighting. / To let up insults the opponent.”
Glück’s free verse is exacting and taut
and rhetorically organized. Thematically,
the mirepoix is composed of family, child-
hood, love, sex, death, nature, animals. Her
classical allusions are deft. She is a serious
poet of the appetites. Even when she osten-
sibly writes about food, she is writing about
11 other things at the same moment. A poem
called “Baskets” includes these lines:

I take my basket to the brazen market,

to the gathering place,

I ask you, how much beauty

can a person bear? It is

heavier than ugliness, even the burden

of emptiness is nothing beside it.

Crates of eggs, papaya, sacks of yellow

lemons —

I am not a strong woman. It isn’t easy

to want so much, to walk

with such a heavy basket,

either bent reed, or willow.

Glück was born in New York City in 1943,

and grew up on Long Island. Her father

helped invent the X-acto knife. That’s a cos-

mically sublime detail; no other poet slices

with such accuracy and deadly intent.

She attended Sarah Lawrence College

and Columbia University, but took no de-

gree. She was United States poet laureate in

2003 and 2004. She has won most of this

country’s major poetry prizes.

When Glück was young, she suffered

from anorexia nervosa. She doesn’t address

this subject often, or directly, in her work.

But here is a section of her poem “Dedica-

tion to Hunger”:

It begins quietly

in certain female children:

the fear of death, taking as its form

dedication to hunger,

because a woman’s body

is a grave; it will accept

anything.

She has become a profound and witty

poet about growing old. In “Averno,” she

writes about the speaker’s children:

I know what they say when I’m out of the

room.

Should I be seeing someone, should I be

taking

one of the new drugs for depression.

I can hear them, in whispers, planning

how to divide the cost.

And I want to scream out

you’re all of you living in a dream.

Bad enough, they think, to watch me

falling apart.

Bad enough without this lecturing they

get these days

as though I had any right to this new

information.

Well, they have the same right.

They’re living in a dream, and I’m

preparing

to be a ghost.

In another poem, she asks, “Why love

what you will lose?” She answers her own

question: “There is nothing else to love.”

Helen Vendler, writing in The New Re-

public, said that Glück’s poems “have

achieved the unusual distinction of being

neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in

the usual senses of those words.”

It’s Glück’s abundant intellect, and deep

feeling, that keeps pulling you back to her

poems. Commenting on the poor choices

the Swedish Academy has made in the past,

Gore Vidal once advised to never underesti-

mate Scandinavian wit.

In the case of Louise Glück, the academy

gets one exactly right.

A Poet Who Confronts the Monsters in Us

A writer’s work

contains many

emotional registers.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1