I guess this book of poems (The Wild Iris) isn't technically mine...Meg, you can claim it back whenever you want. ;)
The Wild Iris, to me, feels like a book that should be taken as a whole, rather than pulling one poem out at a time to look at. But there was no way I was going to read an entire book of poetry aloud at one sitting, so I picked one that I thought would read well. Her work in general, and also, specifically, in The Wild Iris, is sort of dark and spare and full of the feeling of loneliness. It's pretty, though, and works okay to read aloud.
Louise Glück is - um, pretty well decorated, you could say. "In 2003 Glück was named the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her book of essays Proofs and Theories (1994) was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. In addition to the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, she has received many awards and honors for her work, including 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. In 2008, she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award."
She was the judge the year that Richard Siken won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and wrote the foreword for his collection Crush (which I will be reading from at some point in the next ten days). I think I'm going to quote a bit from that introduction today, even though it is about Siken's work, because she wrote it and I am sure I will have lots of other things to say on the day I read from Crush. I love these paragraphs, especially Emily Dickinson's description of what poetry is:
The Wild Iris, to me, feels like a book that should be taken as a whole, rather than pulling one poem out at a time to look at. But there was no way I was going to read an entire book of poetry aloud at one sitting, so I picked one that I thought would read well. Her work in general, and also, specifically, in The Wild Iris, is sort of dark and spare and full of the feeling of loneliness. It's pretty, though, and works okay to read aloud.
Louise Glück is - um, pretty well decorated, you could say. "In 2003 Glück was named the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her book of essays Proofs and Theories (1994) was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. In addition to the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, she has received many awards and honors for her work, including 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. In 2008, she was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award."
She was the judge the year that Richard Siken won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, and wrote the foreword for his collection Crush (which I will be reading from at some point in the next ten days). I think I'm going to quote a bit from that introduction today, even though it is about Siken's work, because she wrote it and I am sure I will have lots of other things to say on the day I read from Crush. I love these paragraphs, especially Emily Dickinson's description of what poetry is:
We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. The great task has been to infuse clarity with the passionate ferment of the inchoate, the chaotic.
Siken takes to heart this exhortation. Crush is the best example I can presently give of profound wildness that is also completely intelligible. By Higginson's report, Emily Dickinson famously remarked, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"
She should, in that remark, have shamed forever the facile, the decorative, the easily consoling, the tame. She names, after all, responses that suggest violent transformation, the overturning of complacency by peril.
In practice, this has meant that poets quote Dickinson and proceed to write poems from which caution and hunger to accommodate present taste have drained all authenticity and unnerving originality. Richard Siken, with the best poets of his impressive generation, has chosen to take Dickinson at her word. I had her reaction.
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