"There were two finalists: Blake’s
'The Little Black Boy' and Stephen Foster’s
'Swanee River.' I paced up and down the second bedroom in my grandmother’s house in Cedarhurst, a village on the south shore of Long Island, reciting, in my head as I preferred, not from my mouth, Blake’s unforgettable poem, and singing, also in my head, the haunting, desolate Foster song. How I came to have read Blake is a mystery. I think there were a few poetry anthologies in my parents’ house among the more common books on politics and history and the many novels. But I associate Blake with my grandmother’s house. My grandmother was not a bookish woman. But there was Blake,
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and also a tiny book of the songs from Shakespeare’s plays, many of which I memorized. I particularly loved the song from
Cymbeline, understanding probably not a word but hearing the tone, the cadences, the ringing imperatives, thrilling to a very timid, fearful child.
'And renownèd be thy grave.' I hoped so."
Glück was an American, and she won the prize in 2020, so I realized I'd made a mistake in
my post 8 days ago, when I said that an American had not won the Nobel literature prize since 2016.
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Why did I stop? Did some instinct
discern a shape, the artist in me
intervening to stop traffic, as it were?...
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7 comments:
Swanee River "revised lyrics." I am betting those were not the lyrics that she had used in her "best poem in the world" contest.
Not the worst time to read Gluck's chapbook, "October." If you aren't depressed enough already.
I just read a couple of her poems. They look like her. Very spare and precise. Her father helped to invent the xacto knife. It's also very spare and sharp and is sometimes more likely to cut its wielder than the item it's pointed at. I don't think she felt much in the way of catharsis after writing those poems.....I think in the long run, the xacto knife will have a more lasting influence on western civ than her poems.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Thanks for printing that. I've never read that bit of shakespeare. As for Ms. Gluck, 80 is a ripe old age, and so i can say that when i heard she got the nobel prize my reaction was "what the Gluck?!"
The best poem is Casey at the Bat.
"This woman was a stupid as she was brilliant."
-The Robot Devil--probably
I was not a fan of her poetry, but RIP.
I'll concede that she did in fact win the Nobel Prize, but the rest sounds like revisionist self-history.
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