"Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child..."

"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."

From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.

I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.

ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.

"When I was a small child of, I think, about five or six, I staged a competition in my head, a contest to decide the greatest poem in the world."

"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."

That is the first paragraph of the Nobel Prize acceptance lecture given by Louise Glück, which I am reading this morning because I'm seeing the obituary for her in the NYT.

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced soon.

 I'm watching the Nobel Prize "twitter" feed and the live-blogging at The Guardian.

I don't know why I'm so interested this year — perhaps because the other news is boring me or the non-boring news isn't being reported — because I expect the name to be virtually unknown to me.

I see Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is in the running. "His short fable, The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, was originally written in Gikuyu and became the most translated story in the history of African literature." 

And then there's Can Xue, Mircea Cărtărescu, Gerald Murnane, and László Krasznahorkai.

I see names I know in the running. For example, Haruki Murakami. But Kazuo Ishiguro won in 2017, so it's too soon to get back to Japan.

Is it time yet for another American? "We" haven't won since 2016. That was the Bob Dylan year. Can't get over that.

ADDED: Watch the live announcement here, at 6 a.m. Central Time. 

AND: The winner is a Norwegian. Jon Fosse — "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable."

BUT:  I was wrong to say that Bob Dylan was the last American to win. 8 days after writing this post, I saw the obituary for Louise Glück:

Louise Glück, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and, in 2020, the Nobel Prize for Literature, died on Friday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 80.

Things that "can only be hinted at" in a short review of the new biography of the poet Adrienne Rich.

"How Louise Glück, the new Nobel laureate, was no admirer of Rich’s teaching practices at Columbia University when Glück was a student there. (Rich’s remarks on her students’ poems were often limited to a comment like, 'I don’t dig it.') How Anthony Burgess sublet Rich’s New York apartment, tore it up, then wrote a novel that satirized its feminist contents." 

That's Dwight Garner, writing in the NYT, who begins by telling us "Long before I read her, I disliked Adrienne Rich" — "She was a radical lesbian separatist who didn’t want men at her readings and would not respond to their questions... a humorless scold... perceived to have bent her sensitive talent on a political wheel." Garner also complains the the biography "makes it difficult for anyone to criticize Rich’s work, for any reason whatsoever, and not be thought complicit in the grinding machinery of misogyny."

I just want to know what Anthony Burgess did, what the "feminist contents" were, and how he satirized them. Here's the biography. From page 246: "[Burgess] cut a tornado's path of destruction through her home.... a mattress missing; a box spring ripped; bedroom tables dotted with cigarette burns; kitchen utensils missing, burned, or broken; a lamp broken; and a sofa and rug stained with spilled food." Rich sought reimbursement, and Burgess said his $475 security deposit ought to cover the "petty" damage, especially since he'd gotten the apartment wired for cable TV. 

The "misogynistic novel" was "The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End" (1974). Enderby ≈ Burgess. He's staying in the apartment of "a humorless, man-hating novelist" — ≈ Rich — "whose bookshelves bulge with treatises on race, gender, and revolution that Enderby views with distaste." The quotes are from the new bio, and they don't convey any spirit of satire. And unfortunately, you can't get "The Clockwork Testament" in a Kindle version, so I've reached a dead end.

"'Teaching,' for figures of her calibre, is often a word that means giving scripted lectures and then fleeing into the wings, or charging mega-dollars for a sun-drenched guru experience at a resort."

"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.

"Completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet. It doesn’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 particular event to deal with in my life...."

Said Louise Glück, who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature today, quote in "'I Was Unprepared': Louise Glück on Poetry, Aging and a Surprise Nobel Prize." 

You can listen to her read her work here: