Book Review: “Beyond the Intensities of the Fountain”
Poet Louise Glück
A Village Life: Poems by Louise Glück. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009).
One way to approach a book of poems is to imagine not how the poet speaks, but from what stage. Wordsworth talks out of the woods, on a long walk. Allen Ginsberg shouts to his reader from a crowded bar. Walt Whitman stretches out in the grass in Fort Greene park in the middle of a fair and talks to the sky. Louise Glück’s work, to me, has always felt unearthly and disembodied. In her early collections, the poems remind me of a wedding tent: like a blindingly white, taut canvas ratcheted to steel poles. At first glance her work is impenetrably cold and flat. Underneath, though, is a teeming crowd—a fatally optimistic couple, a weeping ex-lover, a drunk mother; the exchange of gifts, someone stepping on someone’s toes during the dance.
Her more recent books, including her newest collection, A Village Life, puts its speaker on an amphitheater stage, reciting to rows of empty seats. The audience which Glück’s speakers address (which feels spare to begin with) has one by one retired for the evening, to the poet’s great advantage. Her lyricism is now a bare bones echo of previous poems, her subject matter whittled down to mourning the loss of the sensual world. A Village Life abandons any pretense of interest in love, family, or epic betrayal (some of her previous themes). Now everything has given over in service to one question: how does a person watch the body age, how does a person watch death come?
One of America’s most auspicious poets, Glück was born in New York City in 1943. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Seven Ages (2002), Meadowlands (1996), The Wild Iris (1992), and Ararat (1990). The current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series, she is the recipient of not only the Pulitzer Prize but also the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollinger prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. A professor at Yale University, Glück produces a new book of poems every five years or so (A Village Life comes just four years after her last book Averno).
Throughout her work, Glück has turned to and from traditional poetic lenses to examine her obsessions with sexuality, hunger, and mortality; using Greek mythology, personal narrative, she is (as the critic Helen Vendler wrote) “a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems… have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words.” The confidence and coldness of her work is refreshing; it creates this sense of speaking to the empty amphitheater I mentioned earlier, and the eerie sense that Glück is speaking out loud to no one, like a voice from beyond the grave. Of course, this feeling is the result of impossible control and brevity, and her glittering scalpel-like technique. Her work also relies greatly on her indulgence in the tradition that the poet bends God’s ear. Glück isn’t much interested in overturning cliché; that doesn’t mean, however, that what she is doing isn’t spectacularly difficult and moving.
Like her more innovative contemporary Anne Carson, she has turned to Greek mythology to frame her preoccupations with betrayal, metamorphosis and fate. Averno revolves around Greek mythology and sorcery (with titles like “Persephone the Wanderer,” “Prism,” “A Myth of Innocence,” “A Myth of Devotion,” and “Omens”).
Her book Meadowlands uses gods and goddesses to heighten to epic levels human grief and disgust; in “Circe’s Power” she writes: “I never turned anyone into a pig. / Some people are pigs; I make them / look like pigs. / I’m sick of your world / that lets the outside disguise the inside.” The poem concludes: “My friend, / every sorceress is / a pragmatist at heart; nobody / sees essence who can’t / face limitation.” It’s a common cliché that every poet is trying, throughout their life, to write one poem. “Circe’s Power,” though addressing sinister desire, magic, and transformation, is really a poem about the impossibility of metamorphosis. Glück’s work is about the excruciating inability to believe in a world beyond the sensual world in which we exist. “Nobody / sees essence who can’t / face limitation”: to rejoice fully in the essence of life requires one to acknowledge death—the limitation of the world, or of our human life on earth. In her spectacular book The Seven Ages, Glück writes a heartbreaking elegy for “The Sensual World”:
I caution you as I was never cautioned:
you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to
hunger.
Your body will age, you will continue to need.
You will want the earth, then more of the earth—
Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will
not respond.
It is encompassing, it will not minister.
Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.
A Village Life is about the disillusionment that spring brings newness, the memory of one’s young body when facing the old, the distance the elderly have from young couples. In this way, it offers little new in terms of subject matter or tone. The reader will encounter Glück’s familiar end-stopped lines; simple imagery; declarative sentences and haunting endings. The book is stripped bare; one way we see this is in the repetition of titles through the book. The reader encounters, for example, two poems called “Bats,” two called “Earthworms,” and three “Burning Leaves”; the recycled titles mimic the book’s preoccupation with the exhausting (as opposed to rejuvenating) cycle of seasons which the characters witness, again and again.
This village, of course, is not a community but rather a sort of otherworldly snow-globe, with people and their quiet steps forward and backward; it is a kind of purgatory on earth, with small grievances and smaller pleasures, with exhaustion, silences, disappointments, and yet the ongoing awe in the simple present day. One speaker remembers her childhood: “we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning, / eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.” There is no sense that this honor–just to have a mouth—has transformed somehow into a wiser, albeit quieter poem-speak offered to the reader. Instead, the book is leaden with its silences: “No sound except the roar of the wheat”; “We’d get quiet after a while. The night would get quiet. / We had given the night permission to carry us along.” A man goes into a bar, and tells us about the owner and him—“If we’re alone, he turns down the volume of the television…. / If there’s no game, he’ll pick a film. It’s the same thing—the sound stays off, so there’s only images. / When the film’s over, we compare notes, to see if we both saw the
same story.”
In her essay “Against Sincerity” (in Proofs and Theories, 1994) Glück spends some time considering how, for Keats, “That world—this world—was heaven; in the other he could not believe, nor could he see his life as a ritual preparation. So he immersed himself in the momentary splendor of the material world, which led always to the idea of loss.” It is easy to see why Glück would feel kinship with Keats. Keats, of course, was heavily influenced by Wordsworth, who approached his poetry with more anxiety about the “hidden reaches of the mind” than on the experience of death (inasmuch as they can be separate). Glück’s own work is, in some ways, a melding of the two poets; her own emphasis is on the boundaries and limitations of the philosophical / intellectual and sensual, as well as the paradox of community—that it is absolutely necessary to live our lives with others, and yet impossible to understand another’s subjectivity or share our own.
She writes that Keats “was given to describing his methods of composition in terms implying a giving-in: the poet was to be passive, responsive, available to all sensation. His desire was to reveal the soul, but soul, to Keats, had no spiritual draperies. Spirituality manifests the mind’s intimidating claim to independent life. It was this invention Keats rejected. To Keats, the soul was corporeal and vital and frail; it had no life outside the body.” And so with Glück:
Crossroads
My body, now that we will not be traveling together
much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw
and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I as young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never it its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could
not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you
cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
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