Post by caclark35 on May 20, 2012 20:32:17 GMT -5
Louise Glück is considered by many to be one of America’s most talented contemporary poets. The poet Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing,” and her poetry is noted for its technical precision, sensitivity and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death. Glück’s early collections feature personae grappling with the aftermaths of failed love affairs, disastrous family encounters, and existential despair, and her later work continues to explore the agony of the self.
Glück’s ability to create poetry that many people can understand, relate to, and experience intensely and completely stems from her deceptively straightforward language and poetic voice. Readers and reviewers alike have also marveled at Glück’s gift for creating poetry with a dreamlike quality that at the same time deals with the realities of passionate and emotional subjects.
Louise Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943, to a Wellesley-educated mother and a father who was a first-generation American businessman of Hungarian descent. The firstborn daughter of the family, who died before Glück's birth, is the acknowledged source of the poet's preoccupation with the phenomenon of death (often saying that the dead, “are mysteries”), grieving, and loss that is a resonant theme throughout her work. Her formal education was interrupted in her last year of high school when she began a seven-year course of psychoanalysis. Glück has said that this process taught her to think, and to analyze her own speech. Though she had from her early teenage years wanted to be a poet, the experience of psychoanalysis developed the requisite discipline for the task, so that a year later she enrolled in Dr. Leonie Adams's poetry workshop at Columbia University.
Though Glück's poems are still grounded in a highly individualized personal response to everyday life, she is mostly recognized for her ability to place her individual experience in a larger human context through correlations with Greek mythology and the Bible. Poet, Rosanna Warren has described Glück’s “classicizing gestures” as necessary to her lyric project. Meadowlands (1996), uses the voices of Odysseus and Penelope to create “a kind of high-low rhetorical experiment in marriage studies,” according to Deborah Garrison in the New York Times Book Review. Glück is critical of marriage and reprimands cheaters, “with the smallest hearts [who] have the greatest freedom.” Commenting on the link between Glück’s work and the narrative of Homer, Leslie Ullman added in Poetry that the dynamic of Meadowlands is “played out through poems that speak through or about principle characters in The Odyssey, and it is echoed in poems that do not attempt to disguise their origins in Glück’s own experience.”
Taking the myth of Persephone as its touchstone, Averno’s poems circle around the bonds between mothers and daughters, “the daughter’s body/doesn’t exist, except/as a branch of the mother’s body/that needs to be/reattached at any cost.” In the New York Times, Nicholas Christopher noted Glück’s unique interest in “tapping the wellsprings of myth, collective and personal, to fuel [her] imagination and, with hard-earned clarity and subtle music, to struggle with some of our oldest, most intractable fears—isolation and oblivion, the dissolution of love, the failure of memory, the breakdown of the body and destruction of the spirit.”
Her fourteen books of poetry as well as numerous awards and recognitions, including being named the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress in 2003, all prove her power as a poet and the lasting impression she has had on readers. With that, it is my great pleasure to welcome Ms. Louise Glück.
word count: 597
Glück’s ability to create poetry that many people can understand, relate to, and experience intensely and completely stems from her deceptively straightforward language and poetic voice. Readers and reviewers alike have also marveled at Glück’s gift for creating poetry with a dreamlike quality that at the same time deals with the realities of passionate and emotional subjects.
Louise Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943, to a Wellesley-educated mother and a father who was a first-generation American businessman of Hungarian descent. The firstborn daughter of the family, who died before Glück's birth, is the acknowledged source of the poet's preoccupation with the phenomenon of death (often saying that the dead, “are mysteries”), grieving, and loss that is a resonant theme throughout her work. Her formal education was interrupted in her last year of high school when she began a seven-year course of psychoanalysis. Glück has said that this process taught her to think, and to analyze her own speech. Though she had from her early teenage years wanted to be a poet, the experience of psychoanalysis developed the requisite discipline for the task, so that a year later she enrolled in Dr. Leonie Adams's poetry workshop at Columbia University.
Though Glück's poems are still grounded in a highly individualized personal response to everyday life, she is mostly recognized for her ability to place her individual experience in a larger human context through correlations with Greek mythology and the Bible. Poet, Rosanna Warren has described Glück’s “classicizing gestures” as necessary to her lyric project. Meadowlands (1996), uses the voices of Odysseus and Penelope to create “a kind of high-low rhetorical experiment in marriage studies,” according to Deborah Garrison in the New York Times Book Review. Glück is critical of marriage and reprimands cheaters, “with the smallest hearts [who] have the greatest freedom.” Commenting on the link between Glück’s work and the narrative of Homer, Leslie Ullman added in Poetry that the dynamic of Meadowlands is “played out through poems that speak through or about principle characters in The Odyssey, and it is echoed in poems that do not attempt to disguise their origins in Glück’s own experience.”
Taking the myth of Persephone as its touchstone, Averno’s poems circle around the bonds between mothers and daughters, “the daughter’s body/doesn’t exist, except/as a branch of the mother’s body/that needs to be/reattached at any cost.” In the New York Times, Nicholas Christopher noted Glück’s unique interest in “tapping the wellsprings of myth, collective and personal, to fuel [her] imagination and, with hard-earned clarity and subtle music, to struggle with some of our oldest, most intractable fears—isolation and oblivion, the dissolution of love, the failure of memory, the breakdown of the body and destruction of the spirit.”
Her fourteen books of poetry as well as numerous awards and recognitions, including being named the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress in 2003, all prove her power as a poet and the lasting impression she has had on readers. With that, it is my great pleasure to welcome Ms. Louise Glück.
word count: 597