Louise Glück in Conversation
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: In
issue 36 of American Poet, the
biannual journal of the
Glück is considered by many, including former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, as “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing." Because she only rarely gives interviews, Glück's conversation with Levin allows unique insight into the mind of one of our great poets. The full version of her interview, “For a
Dollar: Louise Glück in Conversation,” can be read here. // Adam Eaglin
Dana Levin: What did [A Village
Life] teach you aesthetically?
Louise Glück: I think I won't even know until I try to do something
else. I remember talking to Richard Siken after Averno. I wasn't writing, and I was beginning to fret about it. I go through
periods—long periods—of not writing. And sometimes that's not the focus of my
anxiety. It's not that I am without anxiety, it's that my anxiety is in some
other place; then all of a sudden I become preoccupied with my silence and
quite panicky. I was entering that period and Richard said, 'Your next book has
to be completely different, just sort of playing in the mud.' And that was
exactly my feeling, that I had done everything I could do at the moment with
poems operating on a vertical axis of transcendence and grief. And this new
manuscript had to be more panoramic, somehow, and casual, with a kind of
unbeautiful surface. So it taught me how to write an unbeautiful surface. What
a triumph. [sardonic laugh]
Just to be able to write a longer poem, I think, was interesting... I had
tremendous pleasure writing these poems. I loved being in that world. And I
could get there almost without effort. Well, for a short period. You know, now
I can't go...
DL: You can never go back to Brigadoon.
LG: No, never! I can't go back to any of these places. None of them. I never re-read my old work, so I don't even know what I think of it.
{More after the jump}
DL: Each of your books presents a voice recognizably yours, and yet
one can also track distinct formal shifts from one collection to the next. Have
such shifts in approach been a conscious aim?
LG: I think the only conscious aim is the wanting to be surprised.
The degree to which I sound like myself seems sort of a curse.
DL: [laughs] That reminds me of Wallace Shawn saying, 'I think
there's something idiotic about the self, that every day you have to get up and
be the same person.'
LG: Yeah! That's the limitation. I'm glad if it also can seem a
virtue.
DL: I know you take teaching very seriously, and that for over a
decade you have been a public champion of the work of emerging writers. How do
mentorship and teaching affect your life?
LG: Ah, how to begin. This is assumed to be an act of generosity on
my part: teaching and editing. I cannot too strenuously make another case. I
don't think anybody does anything that takes this much time, outside the
Catholic church, without a motive of intense self-interest. What I do with
young writers I do because it's fuel for me. And sometimes I tell the winners
of these contests that I'm Dracula, I'm drinking their blood.
I feel quite passionately that the degree to which I have, if I have, stayed
alive as a writer and changed as a writer, owes much to the intensity with
which I've immersed myself in the work, sometimes very alien work, of people
younger than I, people making sounds I haven't heard. That's what I need to
know about.
Virtually every young writer about whose work I've been passionate has
taught me something. From you, I've learned one way of keeping a poem going.
Long lines. It's not that I ever wrote anything that sounds like you, but I was
certainly trying to. When I read Peter Streckfus's work and fell completely
under the spell of that work, I found myself writing a poem I thought I stole
from him. And was alarmed and carefully read through the book that won the Yale
that year, as well as the manuscript, and I could not find what I had written
in his work, but I felt I had to call him and apologize.
DL: How did he take that?
LG: Peter's attitude toward what I consider to be theft is very different. He said, 'Oh, I think this is just wonderful. That's what writers do. We're in dialogue.' And I said, 'Peter, you don't understand – I stole!' But, you know, in every literal way I hadn't. The words were mine. But I knew where the impulse, the stimulus, had come from. And then I tried to do things with it that in fact I hadn't seen in Peter's work, so that I would feel it was mine.
Dear Dana,
I am wondering if it is possible to come into contact with Miss Glück.
Or do I just try to contact her through the university with which she is currently connected?
Hoping for a reply.
Yours truly,
Ella Wagemakers-Sanchez
The Netherlands
Posted by: Ella Wagemakers | December 04, 2010 at 06:19 PM