Media: Commentaries on Poetry (Michigan Writers on the Air)

Hello Aaron! I’d like to introduce you—or maybe re-introduce you, today to the work of a poet named Louise Glück. It’s spelled G-l-u-c-k but you pronounce it Glick—There’s an umlaut over the u. Gluck was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She is the author of many books of poetry, most recently, Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry.

You may know her as the United States poet laureate in 2003, or possibly as the winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for her book, The Wild Iris. It’s that book I want to talk about and read a little from. I think it’s an amazing achievement. The poems are strange little things, speaking in the voices of flowers and of God, as well as of the human poet. Who would try to speak like a flower, with the point of view of a flower, without falling over into sappiness? Who would try to have God’s voice? But she does it, and in each poem, perspective is one we wouldn’t expect. There’s no sentimentality here. Each poem startles us out of our customary way of seeing the world.

In the book, there are a number of poems with the same title, called simply Matins, or Vespers, so that the book seems like a Catholic prayer book, marking the passage of a day in prayers. But oh my, the prayers are not what we expect!

Let me read you this one, as an example. It’s called “Vespers” and it’s near the end of the book. Remember, the poem is a prayer. She’s speaking to God:

End of August. Heat
like a tent over
John’s garden. And some things
have the nerve to be getting started,
clusters of tomatoes, stands
of late lilies—optimism
of the great stalks—imperial
gold and silver: but why
start anything
so close to the end?
Tomatoes that will never ripen, lilies
winter will kill, that won’t
come back in spring. Or
are you thinking
I spend too much time
looking ahead, like
an old woman wearing
sweaters in summer;
are you saying I can
flourish, having
no hope
of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory
of the open throat, white,
spotted with crimson.

Whoo! That’s not cheerful. The poem ends with an image that could be a slit throat! But look how glorious that image is—it’s the image of a flower blooming. Red and white with spots of red. full open. Beautiful. Doesn’t a flower flourish even though it has no hope of enduring?

A theme of the book, one of Gluck’s persistent themes, is that there is no hope. We’re doomed. The poems are dark, no question. But, as Dylan Thomas says in a poem of his, we sing in our chains like the sea.

The poems often seem short and easy in their language, but they remind me of the simplicity of Robert Frost’s poems—they only LOOK simple.

Here’s the title poem. Do you know what a wild iris looks like?

[Aaron: answers]

This iris is describing what it was to come out of the dark earth. It’s describing how terrible it is, to be buried all winter, being conscious of being buried, waiting. Then the rising out of the earth, the speaking in the only voice a flower has, its bloom. It’s uncanny how Gluck makes us feel as if we ARE the iris, and actually, we realize that we ARE, like the iris, the consciousness that waits to speak our own voice.

The Wild Iris
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

I don’t think anyone has ever described the bloom of an iris better than that: a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater. I can’t look at an iris now without seeing a fountain.

Then listen to this one in the voice of a trillium. You know what those look like—

Aaron breaks in and says what they look like.

We have those all over around here in the spring. There are thousands near our cottage at Central Lake. They grow in the deep shade. Gluck uses the voice of the trillium to go back to her often-recurring thought, that we need to be aware of the presence of death, and of grief, to fully live our lives.

Trillium

When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark
seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.
I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see.
And as I watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
Then it wasn't possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.
Are there souls that need
death's presence, as I require protection?
I think if I speak long enough
I will answer that question, I will see
whatever they see, a ladder
reaching through the firs, whatever
calls them to exchange their lives—
Think what I understand already.
I woke up ignorant in a forest;
only a moment ago, I didn't know my voice
if one were given to me
would be so full of grief, my sentences
like cries strung together.
I didn't even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me.

Here’s another, one of my favorites. Now when I call a poem one of my favorites, what I usually mean is that, first of all, it grabs me, makes me see something in a way I hadn’t before. It doesn’t always make me happy. Some of Gluck’s poems are like a fingernail on a blackboard to me. But they feel very true and they’re very skillful. Of course because I’m a poet, I’m always aware—and jealous—of someone else’s great skill.

This poem is called “The Red Poppy.” Again, the poppy’s speaking. The poppy takes the sun for a huge heart. The poppy opens fully to that huge heart. The poppy is speaking to humans, who used to be as simple and clear as a poppy before we became fully “human,” meaning, I take it, all caught up with our minds. If we could open fully now, we’d feel the sun.

The poppy is speaking to us after the full bloom, when it’s shattered. It can only speak—and the same thing is true of us, the poem insinuates—after it’s been shattered. The speaking is a sign of being separate from our original, open and clear mind.

Well, here’s the poem.

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.

Here’s another one called Vespers, another prayer. The speaker has planted a fig tree in Vermont—not a good idea. It’s died. The fig tree becomes for her a symbol of all the things she’s gone without. And yet she’s gone on praising, which ought to earn her a place at God’s right hand, she says. That is, if she still believed in God.

Vespers

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
Here, in Vermont, country
of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
it would mean you existed.
By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
exclusively in warmer climates,
in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,
where are grown the unimaginable
apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps
they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see
the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself
to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.
If there is justice in some other world, those
like myself, whom nature forces
into lives of abstinence, should get
the lion's share of all things, all
objects of hunger, greed being
praise of you. And no one praises
more intensely than I, with more
painfully checked desire, or more deserves
to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking
of the perishable, the immortal fig,
which does not travel.

And then here is God speaking in a poem called “End of Winter”. Again, the God of this poem is not what we’d expect. He is full of grief, full of goodbye, having let go of humans, leaving them to be born into this fleeting and very tangible world.

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.
You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?
Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation
as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves
all brilliance, all vivacity
never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you—
you won't hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,
not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye—
the one continuous line
that binds us to each other.

Isn’t that a fine and unsettling poem?

Okay, one last poem—and maybe you’ll want to go order The Wild Iris for yourself, Aaron, if you don’t have it already. This one is another called Vespers, an end of the day prayer. This one could be spoken by someone trying to grow tomatoes in northern Michigan! It’s a complaining poem, complaining about the huge responsibility of being human, of not knowing the whole picture, of seeing the foreshadowing of trouble and having to live with that anyway.

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.

Louise Gluck’s poems stand outside the “confessional” or “anecdotal” mode. You know what that mode is—those poems depend for their intensity on telling a story to keep our attention. But Gluck’s poems are also intensely personal—you can feel that in the poems. They’re personal and they’re lyric—they stand in one place and sing. What I admire is the strength of the line, the diction, the rhythm, the perfectly realized mood of the poems. They’re not like anything else.