On Louise Gluck: Change What You See (review)

As an undergraduate I was fortunate enough to be taught, briefly, by recent poet laureate Louise Glück, who visited my college to give a reading of her poetry and teach seminars in creative writing. What I remember about those encounters with Glück was the electrifying gravity of her presence, as well as what James Longenbach calls her "typically hushed idiom" (137). It is one of the pleasures of this collection of essays that it is able to convey a sense of that gravity and hush, while also drawing attention to how funny a poet Glück can be, particularly in her recent work. Another important achievement, which is due to the book's emphasis on Glück's entire oeuvre (nine volumes so far), is the insight it provides into how the poems work together within individual collections, as well as how individual collections work within the oeuvre. As such, the volume makes a welcome attempt to account for the achievements so far of one of the U.S.'s most important contemporary poets.

On Louise Glück: Change What You See contains essays by leading critics and poets, as well as an interview between Glück and Diehl. The interview offers those who have not read Proofs & Theories an image of the poet at work. The essays are for the most part interested in the collections that have appeared since 1990 (the year in which Ararat was published). They investigate Glück's metaphysics, in which "unrequited longing is the constitutive feature of consciousness" (34); her use of (detached, skeptical, and contingent) voice; the poems' multiple subjectivities (particularly in The Wild Iris); her "depressive realism" (74–89); and her use of narrative ploys such as the parable and the fable. The function of the "hieratic" in her work is also examined—"Most poets who are good at the hieratic like the hieratic. Louise Glück is one of the exceptions" (63) writes Alan Williamson. Many of the essays explore her relationship to poetic structure and form (Longenbach, following Ellen Bryan Voigt, suggests that we have neglected the former in favor of the latter [145 and 150 n. 6]) and are by extension interested in her attitude towards change and "the new," as evidenced particularly by her manipulation of poetic "closure" and her use of repetition and parallelism. Her fascination with myth, particularly Homeric and Vergilian, though Ovid has also been an important influence, is repeatedly brought into focus, as is her relationship to Dante, and also to the Romantics, to Eliot, Yeats, and (sometimes) to poets outside of the Anglo-American tradition and its foundations.

On the whole, the volume says little about the social aspects of Glück's work. With the exception of a few nuanced but curtailed remarks about, for instance, the much anthologized but (in my opinion rather widely misread) "Mock Orange," one might understand from this volume that Glück isn't particularly interested in the social. Paul Breslin lets himself in for charges of the most blatant gender tourism when he admits to swotting up on anorexia (102) to write one short section of his essay. Attempts are made to trace Glück's progenitors among women poets; Costello shows her recovering, after Firstborn (1968), from the influence of Plathian overstatement (48); Stephen Yenser, like Breslin, suggests that Dickinson has been an important influence (though again on the early work [166]); and Williamson places her within Diehl's tradition of American women poets and the "Counter-Sublime" (67–68). These lines of inquiry, however, are outnumbered by numerous comparisons with male Romantics and modernists which are often less generous to Glück: when she is measured against Eliot, for example, as she frequently is, she is often found wanting. This, for me, begged the question: what might Glück's "imitation" (179) of, for example, Eliot mean, should we be generous enough to set aside the assumption that she is a lesser...