"Glück is a classroom teacher, at home in a small group, around a table. Dozens of great books, winners of awards, were shaped by her vigilant editing in the classroom, which often continues in her apartment and garden in Cambridge. This is part of why so many people seemed to feel that their own lives had somehow been recognized by the announcement of the Nobel. When I was growing up in Vermont, a few mountains over from her, Glück’s work was everywhere; she still feels to me like a seventies figure, something in the key of Joni Mitchell, because of all the bookshelves and coffee tables of that era where her books were found. She was 'our' poet. Now I think of all the waiters and cheesemongers and cabbies and neighborhood people in Cambridge who know her, and think of her as 'their' poet.... When I told her how a friend was courting his new, young wife by reading aloud poems from her book 'The Wild Iris,' she laughed and said something like 'that book is very useful for people who prefer to view their carnal needs in spiritual terms.'"
Writes Dan Chiasson, in
"How Louise Glück, Nobel Laureate, Became Our Poet
For decades, she has taught us the contours of our own inner lives" (The New Yorker).
The way Chiasson talks about the 70s, I thought he should be approximately my age, but he was
born in 1971, 20 years after me, so "something in the key of Joni Mitchell" doesn't mean that period of young adulthood that I lived through, but — perhaps — that place out there where other people had the advantage of adulthood. I'm thinking the way he feels about 1970s Joni Mitchel —
ladies of the canyon? — is about how I felt about
beatniks...
"Beat Generation" sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark glasses, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun—thus to be either condemned or imitated. Suburban couples could have beatnik parties on Saturday nights and drink too much and fondle each other's wives....
Which reminds me — here, you can buy "Wild Iris," if you'd like to view your carnal needs in spiritual terms.
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22 comments:
I suspect he means that Gluck, like the rest of his circle, hasn't had an original thought since the '70s.
“Teaching,” for figures of her calibre, is often a word that means giving scripted lectures and then fleeing into the wings...
Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. Chiasson has been contributing poems to The New Yorker since 2000 and reviews since 2007. He teaches English at Wellesley College...
Hopefully not American English...
"contours of our own inner lives." Garbage. Absolute Vogon poetry. This is what passes for poetry nowadays. The deep thoughtful reflections worshiped by a growing idiocracy, well-suited only to a future beset by a perennial dumpster fire.
Why am I not surprised.
As Jerry Seinfeld says that's either pretentious or wrong...
...and works for me.
Her father and uncle invented the X-Acto knife.
Glück's poems? They're not poetry - they're prose.
Sounds like a self-referential in-group thing.
Something or someone liked because they are familiar.
Thats ok to a degree. I am fond of things and people and books of my milieu.
Thats why I like "Tales of the City", no matter how not-me its concerns are. It is because I know those places and people so well, the hills and the homes and the stair paths with gorgeous views, and even the North Beach Safeway. I may have dated Mary Ann, or several of her, and I know I dated Mona (the maybe-lesbian). Not the originals of course, but the very same in every other way. And I shortly figured out how tragic their situations were, in that glorious human fly-trap. "Tales" is a tear-jerker, after some experience, a tragedy written as a blithe, merry stroll by the graveyard, all these bright, beautiful, amusing, and very real people (I have met them, after all), doomed to dying by inches.
So thats me, out of San Francisco. But these things are not universal. Nor I think is that life in Cambridge.
'that book is very useful for people who prefer to view their carnal needs in spiritual terms.'
Good line. Good for her for not (apparently) taking her work too seriously. I'm not a big reader of poetry, but that sentence makes me want to look her up.
You posted on two of the fake Nobel prizes, but meanwhile two women won a real Nobel prize for their work on gene editing.
In those days Laurel canyon was full of carpetbaggers. The real experience of southern California enlightenment in the '70s took place in Topanga canyon.
Having used Exacto Knives both to cut things and myself, things on purpose, myself accidentally while attempting to cut things, I approve of her relatives invention. Exacto Knives cut many things much better than a Swiss Army Knife, which is another cutting device most heavily lauded for having other devices attached.
I call Boomer.
Dr. Evil: I like to see girls of that... caliber.
Dr. Evil: By "caliber," of course, I refer to both the size of their gun barrels and the high quality of their characters... Two meanings... caliber... it's a homonym... Forget it.
"... she has taught us the contours of our own inner lives"
Barf. Speak for yourself, dude. And get rid of "own", it is unneeded.
Do I get extra credit for using "dude"?
He teaches English at Wellesley College...
Hopefully not American English...
Humour him.
What kind of "American" uses the two dots over the "U"? That screams pretension or Un-American. Anyway, she joins the list of obscure writers/poets that have Nobel Prizes that no one has read or will read. BTW, the Nobel Prize committee seems to have something against white male Christians. Here are the award winners since 1976 for the English Language:
Gluck, Brodskey, Bellow, Singer, Dylan - Jewish American
Lessing, Pinter, Gordimer - Jewish English/South African
Morrison, Walcott, Soyinka - Black
Naipal - Indian
Munro - Canadian Female
The only literature winners that are Male, White, and non-jewish are: Coetzee, Golding, and an Irishman who wrote:
Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised
My passport's green.
No glass of ours was ever raised
To toast The Queen.
Every time I see her name I think Glock. Which is a pistol, and I don't think she's a pistol packing mama.
Read a few poems from that and didn't see what was so seductive about it. Maybe I didn't read enough, or maybe it's just for the New Yorker mag crowd.
The inscription on the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature) reads: "I am all that is, and that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from before my face." Kant thought this about this inscription: "Perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance or a thought more sublimely expressed... ."
Has Gluck ever written anything even close to the depth of this poetry?
How Louise Glück, Nobel Laureate, Became Our Poet
I had never heard of her before, so she was never my poet. My indifference to poetry is the result of being subjected to English teachers and professors bloviating about literary criticism. Finding symbolism where it is not.
Gervase Phinn, the English teacher and teacher inspector turned comic author, wrote about a poetry workshop he conducted for teachers. He wrote a poem on the spot about a flower he saw outside -a rare sight in the dead of a Yorkshire winter.The teachers found all sorts of symbolism about the poem. All that alleged symbolism was imaginary because Phinn had spent all of a minute or so in composing the poem. He later found out that someone had taken the flower from a florist shop's arrangement.
"I saw you when you were happy and I remember the look you gave me when you were sad, a look of gratefulness that someone still cared. There were so many of us, those who cared".
Sophocles did not write that.
@mikee
I spent the first ten years of my career cutting and pasting (for real) type and graphics on art boards using wax and an X-acto knife.
If I'd bothered to go to medical school I would have been the world's greatest surgeon : )
Yes, I sliced off my fair share of fingertips...
Maybe I should have been a safe-cracker instead...
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