Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück, a poet of unblinking honesty and perception who wove classical allegory, philosophical musings, bitter memories and humor into a timeless portrait of a fallen and heartbreaking world, has died aged 80.
Glück’s death was confirmed Friday by Jonathan Galassi, his editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
He died of cancer at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, according to his publisher.
A former student of Glück, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, said that the author had just been diagnosed.
“I found it very similar to him that he only found out he had cancer a few days before he died,” Graham said. “His overall sensibility — both inside and outside the yard — is cut so close to the spine of time.”
In a career spanning more than 60 years, Glück created narratives of trauma, disillusionment, stasis and longing, punctuated by moments – but only moments – of joy and contentment.
In awarding him the literary prize in 2020, the first time an American poet had been honored since TS Eliot in 1948, the Nobel judges praised “his unmistakable poetic voice that with its resolute beauty makes universal individual existence.”
Glück’s poems are often short, a page or less in length, an example of his attachment to “the unspeakable, to the suggestive, to the eloquent, the deliberate silence.”
President Barack Obama awarded Glück the 2015 National Humanities Medal for “decades of powerful lyrical poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively.” Reuters
Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and Eliot among others, he questioned and sometimes outright rejected the bond of love and sex, what he called the “unifying premise” in his most famous poem, “Mock Orange.”
In some ways, life for Glück is like a troubled romance – destined to be unhappy, but meaningful because pain is our natural state – and better than what he assumed would follow.
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, can survive,” he once wrote.
In her poem “Summer,” the narrator addresses her husband and remembers “our first happy days,” when everything seemed “ripe.”
Then the circle is closed. Slowly the night grew cold;
willow leaf pendant
yellowing and falling. And in each we begin
deep isolation, although we never talk about this,
absence of regret.
We are artists again, my husband.
We can continue the journey.
In some ways, life for Glück is like a troubled romance — destined to be unhappy, but meaningful because pain is our natural state — and better than what he assumed would follow.AP
Poet Tracy K. Smith, a Pulitzer winner, said in a statement Friday that Glück’s poetry had “saved” her many times.
“I always think of these lines from ‘The Wild Iris’: ‘At the end of my suffering / there is a door.’ And the following line from ‘The House on Marshland’: ‘Darkness rises, imagine, in your life.’ It is as if his spare patient syntax forms a path into and through the burdens of life,” he wrote.
Glück published more than a dozen books of poetry, along with essays and a short prose fable, “Marigold and Rose.” He taps into everything from Penelope’s weaving in “The Odyssey” to an unlikely muse, the Meadowlands sports complex, which inspires him to ask: “How did the Giants name/place the Meadowlands? It has/about a lot in common with a meadow/ like the inside of an oven.”
In 1993, he won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Wild Iris,” an exchange in part between a beleaguered gardener and an unfeeling deity.
What is my heart to you / that you must break it again and again, “asked the gardener. God answered: “My poor inspired creation … You / are too small like me in the end / to please me.”
Influenced by Shakespeare, Greek mythology and Eliot among others, he questioned and sometimes outright rejected the bond of love and sex, which he called the “unifying premise” in his most famous poem, “Mock Orange.” via REUTERS
His other books include the collection “The Seven Ages,” “The Triumph of Achilles,” “Vita Nova” and the highly acclaimed anthology, “Poems 1962-2012.”
In addition to winning the Pulitzer, he received the Bollingen Prize in 2001 for lifetime achievement and the National Book Award in 2014 for “Faithful and Virtuous Night”.
He was US poet laureate in 2003-2004 and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2015 for “decades of powerful lyrical poetry that defies all attempts to label it definitively.”
Glück has been married and divorced twice and has a son, Noah, with her second husband, John Darnow.
He taught at several schools, including Stanford University and Yale University, and considered his experiences in the classroom not as a distraction from his poetry, but as a “prescription for lethargy.” Students will remember him as demanding and inspiring, not to make anyone cry, but also appreciated for guiding young people to find their own voice.
“You’ll hand something over and Louise will find a line that works,” poet Claudia Rankine, who studied under Glück at Williams College, told The Associated Press in 2020. “There’s no place for mediocre goodness, there’s no false praise. When Louise speaks you believe her because she does not hide her modesty.”
A New York City native who grew up on Long Island, New York, he is of Eastern European Jewish descent and heir to an everyday invention not associated with poetry: His father helped invent the X-Acto knife.
Her mother, Glück would write, was the family’s “housekeeper-all-work moral leader”, whose judgment of her stories and poems she held in high esteem above all others.
Glück was also among three sisters, one of whom died before he was born, a tragedy he apparently alludes to in his poem “Parados.”
A long time ago, I was hurt.
I have learned
exists, in response,
not connected
with the world: I will tell you
what i mean to be –
listening device.
Not inert: still.
A piece of wood. stone
Describing himself as born to “witness”, Glück was comfortable with the written word and considered the English language his gift, even his “inheritance”.
But as a teenager, he was so ambitious and self-critical that he was at war with his own body. She suffered from anorexia, dropped to 75 pounds and feared her death.
His life, creative and otherwise, was saved after he chose to see a psychoanalyst
“Analysis taught me to think. Taught me to use my tendency to object to ideas articulated about my own ideas, taught me to use skepticism, to examine my own speech for its avoidance and elimination,” he said during a 1989 lecture at the Guggenheim Museum. “The longer I withhold conclusions, the more that I saw. I learned, I believe, how to write, too.”
Glück was too frail to become a full-time college student and instead took classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, finding mentors in poet-teachers Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. By his mid-20s, he had published poems in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.
Glück stands next to his Nobel Prize for Literature medal and diploma outside his home in Cambridge in 2020.REUTERS
Glück’s debut book, “Firstborn,” was published in 1968, and preceded a long writer’s block that ended while he was teaching at Goddard College in the early 1970s.
He once believed that poets should avoid academia, but found involvement with Goddard’s students so enriching that he began writing poetry again, a work he considered well beyond the “rigid presentation” of “Firstborn.”
Instead of silence he found a new, more dynamic voice.
His second book, “The House on Marshland,” came out in 1975 and was considered his critical success.
But he continued to suffer for years from what he calls a “brutal void of punishment,” as he tried everything from gardening to listening to Sam Cooke records to get out.
Subsequent books such as “The Wild Iris” and “Ararat” became evidence of personal and creative reinvention, as if the old books had been written by someone else.
“I always had this magical way of thinking about hating my previous books as a way to push myself forward,” he told Washington Square Review in 2015. “And I realized that I had a sneaking-up feeling of pride in accomplishment. Sometimes I just put my book together and think, ‘Wow, you’re not wasting your time.’ But then I was so scared because it was a completely new sensation, that pride, and I thought, ‘Oh, this means really bad things.'”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
