Louise Glück wins 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

I am going to begin this entry simply by saying how glad I am that Louise Glück has won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.

A prominent website for poetry, www.poetry.org, offers a brief biographical description:

"Louise Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943, and grew up on Long Island. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), which won the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry; Averno (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; and Vita Nova (Ecco Press, 1999), winner of Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize and The New Yorker’s Book Award in Poetry. In 2004, Sarabande Books released her six-part poem “October” as a chapbook.

"Her other award-winning books include The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; Ararat (Ecco Press, 1990), for which she received the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco Press, 1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award.

"In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: “Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither ‘confessional’ nor ‘intellectual’ in the usual senses of those words.”

"Glück has also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco Press, 1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her honors include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"The recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Glück was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. In the fall of 2003, she was appointed as the Library of Congress’s twelfth poet laureate consultant in poetry. She served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets from 2003 to 2010.

"In 2008, Glück was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. Her collection, Poems 1962-2012, was awarded the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2015, she was awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently, Glück is a writer-in-residence at Yale University."

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A few of Glück's shorter poems:

 

Vita Nova

 

You saved me, you should remember me.

 

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.

Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

 

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

 

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,   

laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,

something like that.

 

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.

Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.

And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;

perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

 

Crucial

sounds or gestures like

a track laid down before the larger themes

 

and then unused, buried.

 

Islands in the distance. My mother   

holding out a plate of little cakes—

 

as far as I remember, changed

in no detail, the moment

vivid, intact, having never been

exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age   

hungry for life, utterly confident—

 

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green   

pieced into the dark existing ground.

 

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time   

not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet   

it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

 

Confession

 

To say I'm without fear—

It wouldn't be true.

I'm afraid of sickness, humiliation.

Like anyone, I have my dreams.

But I've learned to hide them,

To protect myself

From fulfillment: all happiness

Attracts the Fates' anger.

They are sisters, savages—

In the end they have

No emotion but envy.

 

The Past

 

Small light in the sky appearing
suddenly between
two pine boughs, their fine needles

now etched onto the radiant surface
and above this
high, feathery heaven—

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine,
most intense when the wind blows through it
and the sound it makes equally strange,
like the sound of the wind in a movie—

Shadows moving. The ropes
making the sound they make. What you hear now
will be the sound of the nightingale, Chordata,
the male bird courting the female—

The ropes shift. The hammock
sways in the wind, tied
firmly between two pine trees.

Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine.

It is my mother’s voice you hear
or is it only the sound the trees make
when the air passes through them

because what sound would it make,
passing through nothing?

 

The Red Poppy

 

The great thing

is not having 
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they 
govern me. I have 
a lord in heaven 
called the sun, and open 
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire 
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, 
were you like me once, long ago, 
before you were human? Did you 
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never 
open again? Because in truth 
I am speaking now 
the way you do. I speak 
because I am shattered.

Vespers

 

In your extended absence, you permit me 
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report 
failure in my assignment, principally 
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow 
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold 
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come 
so often here, while other regions get 
twelve weeks of summer. All this 
belongs to you: on the other hand, 
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots 
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart 
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly 
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of 
that term. You who do not discriminate 
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, 
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know 
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible 
for these vines.

Aboriginal Landscape

 

You’re stepping on your father, my mother said,

and indeed I was standing exactly in the center

of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been

my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so.

 

You’re stepping on your father, she repeated,

louder this time, which began to be strange to me,

since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it.

 

I moved slightly to the side, to where

my father ended and my mother began.

 

The cemetery was silent. Wind blew through the trees;

I could hear, very faintly, sounds of  weeping several rows away,

and beyond that, a dog wailing.

 

At length these sounds abated. It crossed my mind

I had no memory of   being driven here,

to what now seemed a cemetery, though it could have been

a cemetery in my mind only; perhaps it was a park, or if not a park,

a garden or bower, perfumed, I now realized, with the scent of roses —

douceur de vivre filling the air, the sweetness of  living,

as the saying goes. At some point,

 

it occurred to me I was alone.

Where had the others gone,

my cousins and sister, Caitlin and Abigail?

 

By now the light was fading. Where was the car

waiting to take us home?

 

I then began seeking for some alternative. I felt

an impatience growing in me, approaching, I would say, anxiety.

Finally, in the distance, I made out a small train,

stopped, it seemed, behind some foliage, the conductor

lingering against a doorframe, smoking a cigarette.

 

Do not forget me, I cried, running now

over many plots, many mothers and fathers —

 

Do not forget me, I cried, when at last I reached him.

Madam, he said, pointing to the tracks,

surely you realize this is the end, the tracks do not go further.

His words were harsh, and yet his eyes were kind;

this encouraged me to press my case harder.

But they go back, I said, and I remarked

their sturdiness, as though they had many such returns ahead of them.

 

You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confront

much sorrow and disappointment.

He gazed at me with increasing frankness.

I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.

 

Now I spoke as to an old friend:

What of  you, I said, since he was free to leave,

have you no wish to go home,

to see the city again?

 

This is my home, he said.

The city — the city is where I disappear.

 

 

 

All Hallows

 

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

Sleep in their blue yoke,

The fields having been

Picked clean, the sheaves

Bound evenly and piled at the roadside

Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

 

This is the barrenness

Of harvest or pestilence

And the wife leaning out the window

With her hand extended, as in payment,

And the seeds

Distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

 

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

 

 

 

Grandmother in the Garden

 

The grass below the willow

Of my daughter's wash is curled

With earthworms is curled

Is measured into row on row

Of unspiced houses, painted to seem real.

The drugged Long Island summer sun drains

Pattern from those empty sleeves, beyond my grandson

Squealing in his pen. I have survived my life.

The yellow daylight lines the oak leaf

And the wire vines melt with the unchanged changes

Of the baby. My children have their husbands' hands.

My husband's framed, propped bald as a baby on their pianos,

My tremendous man. I close my eyes. And all the clothes

I have thrown out come back to me, the banners

Of my daughters' slips ... they drift; I see the sheer

Summer cotton drift, equivalent to air.