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Louise Glück’s Twenty-First-Century Lyric
Abstract
This essay examines a contemporary poetics that implicitly challenges prevail- ing critiques of lyric as asocial, monologic, and naively self-expressive. Louise Glück practices a lyric mode whose plainspoken surface and emotional imme- diacy belie its metalinguistic and metafictional complexity. Her poems' illocu- tionary structures and their attunement to everyday grammatical nuance convey an understanding of language as situational, context-dependent shared action, an understanding that chimes with the insights of ordinary-language philosophy. The perspectives offered by Glück's work can fruitfully complicate dominant models of lyric and binary narratives of American poetic history that set lyric voice against philosophical ambition and linguistic innovation.
... Her poetics persona is alive and envisions an overhearer and a listener, that is, sometimes the reader and her subjective self. Sastri (2014) also asserts that the subjective voice of her poetry is her personal self which is naïve and self-expressive. It is intuitive. ...
The poetry of Louise Glück (b. 1943) is characterized by the confusion and disorder that a seeker faces on the path of self-realization. The disorder is, in a way, a symbol of new knowledge and clarity. Hence, the poetic persona (the first person pronoun/ the speaker/ the adept/ the lover/ the subject self/ the voice/ the self) "I" in her verse is in a struggle with itself to reach some shore swimming across the ocean of multiple disorders. The study is about the poetic persona "I" as portrayed in Glück's poetry and its struggle to initiate a spiritual journey to find the ultimate truth. The persona in her poetry is a seeker that is in search of self-realization which is a spiritual and mystical notion in Sufism. The study traces several stages of the persona's journey that include existential crisis, self-awareness, self-purification, self-illumination, and its final stage self-realization or the fulfillment of life's purpose. For the theoretical insight to interpret the selected texts, Ibn-e-Arabi's mysticism was consulted as he is the first to systematize Islamic mysticism, that is. Sufism. The selected poetry of Glück was interpreted in the light of Sufism to find the poetic persona of Gluck as a Sufi. However, the study concludes that the poetic persona of Gluck remains within the station of awakening and purification of the self and fails to achieve illumination of it.
This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion for wonder at the unlikely chance of having been born, and the contingency and possibility for beginning something new associated with natality by Hannah Arendt and others. In Glück’s work, the theme of natality comes across in poems concerning pregnancy, birth, infants, children, and mothers. Several of her poems feature a hybrid identification as child and as mother, a hybridity that enables the apprehension of natality and that leads to a mode of poetic speech that originates in, and is imbricated with, listening as an alternative to knowing. This essay examines some of Glück’s earlier poetry in these terms before turning to her 2006 volume Averno, which retells the myth of Persephone. Undeniably preoccupied with death, Averno is, I argue, equally concerned with birth, mindful that human finitude itself is double or hybrid. Although many poems cast Demeter as a smothering, possessive mother, Averno, at key moments, takes into account a mother’s perspective as well as a child’s. This hybrid identification gives rise to the emergence of an unexpected lyric voice that both listens and sings.
This study demonstrates how mythical narrative constructs a post-confessional tone in Louise Gluck's Averno (2006) through her personal experience of love, memory, liberty of mind and body, morality, and freedom of gender identity. Averno is a prolonged mourning; its lengthy, frenetic compositions are equally fascinating, while traditional climaxes or solace are equally magnificent despite being violent and heartbroken. Averno presents an autobiographical narrative, the terrific eternal reality, and juxtaposes the link between myth and narrative of personal experiences into a universal context. The myth of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades brings Gluck's infatuation with death to relate to the nature of the underworld and earth. Persephone's image in Averno symbolizes Gluck's disappointment in love, individual journey of survival, and hope. Gluck's uses of mythical allegory challenge the notion of patriarchy, and the standard of female as an object of violence by providing a voice to the powerless victim, which conflates mythical past and contemporary reality by transcending the biography and avoiding Gluck's direct self-confessionalism. Thus, this study explores Gluck's self-proclaim confessionalism through her poetic expression of mythical narrative, emotional memory, and experiences of personal suffering in Averno.
Emily Berry and Ocean Vuong have each written about their fascination with the physical and linguistic arrangement of a poemon the page, and yet their poetry has typically been read as purely confessional, concerned primarily with emotion and the revelation of personal experience, rather than an attempt to interrogate the nature of language itself. This article examines Emily Berry’sStranger, Baby and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds,analysing their use of blank space in these collections, and the way in which they use this space, in its physical, linguistic and metaphorical forms, to emphasise the constructed nature of their poems, to evoke a sense of absence, distance or detachment, presentingus with the emotional complexities of grief, abandonment and dislocation, whilst also demonstrating these emotional states to the reader. It will propose that this use of blank space creates, ineffect, a new form of lyric poetry, one which combines the experiential focus of the confessional lyric with the self-analysis of the Imagists and Language poets, so that Berry and Vuong interrogate the inevitable failure of their own poems, emphasising theimpossible gap between traumatic experience and its articulation through language.
This article examines the work of British poet Tom Pickard, taking the publication of his collected poems as an occasion to renew an appreciation of the voice as an analytic category for the study of twentieth-century and contemporary British poetry. Focusing on a range of Pickard’s work, especially Ballad of Jamie Allan, the article suggests that rather than view the recent history of British poetry in terms of a modernist/antimodernist dichotomy, with poets assigned to either side of that divide, scholars might productively attend to how voice, as an analytic category and a textual effect, illuminates poetic histories that transgress the bounds of received aesthetic-political narratives.
This chapter brings together Mediterranean studies and poetics. At its heart, it asks a larger question—What is “Mediterranean literature”?—and advances the specific category of “Mediterranean lyric” through the examples of three poets from the contemporary francoarab Mediterranean world. The first section of the chapter builds on scholarship by Sharon Kinoshita in defining Mediterranean literature as multilingual, cross-linguistic, and connective, and it outlines some of the shortfalls of recent literary scholarship on the Mediterranean. Next, drawing on Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, it insists that literature should be “of the Mediterranean,” which designates the emergence of a different literary “contemporaneity” (following Giorgio Agamben): a literary aesthetics of persistent deferral (translation) and referral (intertextuality), of untimeliness and anachronism. The second section presents a critical digest of lyric theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and closes with a special consideration of French poetician Jean-Marie Gleize. The third and final section offers three readings of Mediterranean lyric: the translational rewriting by Habib Tengour of a foundational Arabic poetic genre; a decade-long project of composing sequences of textual poeticities by Emmanuel Hocquard that efface the lyric subject; and the surrealist poetics of invective political commitment in a chapbook by Serge Pey. Together, the cases presented outline a methodology for further inquiry into the region’s other languages. The conclusion suggests that Mediterranean lyric may hold the key to new and impossible poetic modes.
While In New Haven In October 1993, The Tunisian French writer, public intellectual, and Sui specialist Abdelwahab Med deb (1946-2014) began composing the poem Les 99 stations de Yale ("he 99 Stations of Yale"). he slim chapbook was published in 1995 by the small Languedoc-Roussillon press Fata Morgana, whose heteroclite catalog showcases limited-run artistic reeditions of modern and avant-garde classics. he press also curates innovative emergent voices that push the limits of the new lyric hybridity (Sastri 191) characteristic of French and American poetry today. Operating out of the land of the troubadours and close to the birthplaces of the major Sui poets and philosophers of al-Andalus, Fata Morgana has been cultivating a unique southern French and Mediterranean poetic identity. he second of Meddeb's ive chapbooks with the press, Les 99 stations de Yale captures its author's indebtedness to European, especially French, high poetic modernism; to the French literary turn to the United States (Hollier 1064); and to the author's desire to be read in the lineage of the great Sui poets of classical Arabic literature, in whose spirit he re imagines the francophone lyric. Patterned ater the lives of Sui poets and saints, the circles of Sui worship, and the circularities of Arabic literature and Islamic philosophy, Meddeb's lyric seeks mystic sublimation of the beloved-an idealized union with the ob jet d'amour-through formal structure, thematic content, intertextuality, and translational ingenuity.
Lyric Petrologies: Languages of Stone in Rilke, Trakl, Mandelstam, Celan, and Sachs examines the poetics of stone in twentieth-century German and Russian lyric. I illuminate a diverse line of development whereby stone???traditionally a signal of silence, immutability, insignificance, even a crushing heaviness???emerges as the conceptual and figurative ground of reconfigured lyric languages and subjectivities. My close, comparative readings demonstrate that for authors like Celan, Mandelstam, and Sachs, who could hardly have lived through darker times, stone offers alternative but affirmative models for lyric subjectivity.
My project defines a set of rhetorical devices that characterize the varying lyrics of stone. Lyrics by Rilke, Trakl, and Mandelstam from the first decades of the century demonstrate what I call invocations of stone, by addressing crafted works (i.e., architecture and sculpture) as signs of human history and affect. Later texts from Celan???s collections of the 1950s and 1960s gravitate toward ???found??? stone, and import geological discourse into lyric???a project foreshadowed in the later texts of Mandelstam, a poet whom Celan translated and declared a formative influence. Their texts think in terms of stone, aligning lyric with notions of stone???s alternative, natural history. Celan's texts, along with those of his contemporary Sachs, also seek to write as stone, by emulating stone???s varying legibilities???as a scientific or mystical record of the readable earth, or as a tabula rasa for more idiosyncratic, phenomenological readings. In the light of debates about the legitimacy and efficacy of post-Holocaust lyric, Celan's and Sachs' texts demonstrate stone's potentiality to model reconceptualized lyric languages and subjectivities.
My readings are buttressed by considerations of the ???language of things??? in texts by Benjamin and others, as well as ideas about lyric subjectivity drawn from Nietzsche, Susman, Adorno, and Anglo-American literary theory. Challenging the suppositions that lyric represents an individual subjectivity, expression, and voice, Lyric Petrologies introduces the poetics of nonhuman, recalcitrant, and mute stone within the context of contemporary revisions of the idea of lyric. My readings in Lyric Petrologies also add to contemporary critical conversations on object theories and new materialisms, by acknowledging and investigating varying ways in which poetic language mediates matter.
Ralph Cohen founded New Literary History in 1969, inaugurating the first of a series of journals of literary theory that exercised a powerful effect on criticism. Swiftly followed by diacritics (1970), SubStance (1971), boundary 2 (1973), Semiotexte (1974), and Critical Inquiry (1974), New Literary History is the only one to have been led for forty years by its founder, and I take this opportunity to pay homage to Ralph Cohen for his remarkable record of continuing intellectual leadership, as he hands over the journal to his younger colleagues. Established with the goal of revitalizing literary history, which had fallen into disrepute or at least neglect in the years of the New Criticism, the journal did not initially succeed on that front, though it did give prominence to the aesthetics of reception, which seemed at the time the most promising candidate for renovating literary history. With a judicious sense of what was important, Ralph Cohen made New Literary History a major forum for the discussion and assimilation of European work in literary theory and for interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary studies in the humanities. In its eighth year, the journal changed the description offered on the masthead to reflect what had become its central mission, welcoming "theoretical articles on literature … and articles from other disciplines that help interpret or define the problems of literary history or literary study." But Ralph Cohen remained in his own work faithful to the project of rethinking literary history. His scholarship on James Thomson's The Seasons led to two monumental works, The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's "The Seasons" and the Language of Criticism, and The Unfolding of "The Seasons," which focused on problems of literary criticism by examining the critical reception of a poem that was reprinted an amazing number of times over the course of a century.
Above all, he saw to it that from time to time scholars returned to the problem of genre. Periodically devoting special issues of the journal to this unpopular topic, he kept it before us as a crucial concept for literary history, perhaps even the major site of literary history, since if literature is more than a succession of individual works, it may be at the level of genre (the modifications of genres, the rise of new genres, and the eclipse of the old), that literature has a history. But his claims for genre and genre study are even broader: "Genre study is more than another approach to literature or to social institutions or scientific practices; it analyzes our procedures for acquiring and accumulating knowledge, including the changes that knowledge undergoes."
In an article entitled "History and Genre," Cohen quotes Fredric Jameson's claim in The Political Unconscious that genre criticism has been "thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and practice," and he sets about efficiently and systematically to consider reasons for the disparagement of the idea of genre and to elucidate a conception of genre that can be defended against common criticisms. Though skepticism about the idea of genre has remained powerful in literary studies, I believe there are signs of a growing recognition of the importance of generic categories. In 2007, PMLA devoted a special issue to "Remapping Genre"; the subject of the September 2009 meeting of The English Institute was simply "Genre"; and the so-called "new lyric studies" has sparked a lively debate about the validity and bearing of the notion of the lyric as a genre. It seems timely to take up the sort of argument offered by Ralph Cohen's discussion of the category of genre, its relation to history and importance to literary studies.
Traditionally, theorists say there are two sorts of theories of genres, empirical and theoretical; the latter is based on some claim about elementary possibilities of thought, representation, or discourse. Aristotle distinguishes literary types according to the possible modes and objects of representation. Northrop Frye bases genre categories on "radicals [root forms] of presentation": "words may be acted in front of a spectator, they may be spoken in front of a listener, they may be sung or chanted, and they may be written for a reader"—fundamental possibilities, which for him yield drama, epic, lyric, and narrative fiction...
Although form and history are joined in reading, the profession of literary studies has regularly regarded formalism and historicism as opposites and even antagonists. When dichotomous terms replicate themselves without mediation, a phenomenological approach to resolving the stalemate is typically to reflect on how they interact in lived experience. Refocusing attention in this way, I offer five theses on how history and form are connected in the experience of reading: (1) Literary works are historical entities, but they are not reducible to their origins. (2) The historical meaning of a literary work includes the history of its reception. (3) Reading literature entails a response to value and form. (4) The form of a literary work is integral to its moral, social, and political meaning. (5) Unmasking is not an end in itself but a means to various kinds of revelations. I develop these theses by engaging the arguments of some of the best formalist and historicist critics, focusing mainly on well-known examples from the New Critics and the New Historicists, and by trying to bring out aspects of the reading experience that they ignore or insufficiently acknowledge. My goal is to recover the interaction of form and history by analyzing reading as an intersubjective experience in which literary works are preserved and passed on through our ever-changing engagement with their forms.
This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.
David Schalkwyk offers a sustained reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to his plays. He argues that the language of the sonnets is primarily performative rather than descriptive, and bases this distinction on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. In a wide-ranging analysis of both the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare's sonnets and the Petrarchan discourses in a selection of plays, Schalkwyk addresses such issues as embodiment and silencing, interiority and theatricality, inequalities of power, status, gender and desire, both in the published poems and on the stage and in the context of the early modern period. In a provocative discussion of the question of proper names and naming events in the sonnets and plays, the book seeks to reopen the question of the autobiographical nature of Shakespeare's sonnets.
This text collects all Austin’s published articles plus a new one, ch. 13, hitherto unpublished. The analysis of the ordinary language to clarify philosophical questions is the common element of the 13 papers. Chapters 2 and 4 discuss the nature of knowledge, focusing on ‘performative utterances’. The doctrine of ‘speech acts’, i.e. a statement may be the pragmatic use of language, is discussed in Chs 6 and 10. Chapters 8, 9, and 12 reflect on the problems the language encounters in discussing actions and consider the cases of excuses, accusations, and freedom. The ‘correspondence theory’, i.e. a statement is truth when it corresponds to a fact, is presented in Chs 5 and 6. Finally, Chs 1 and 3 study how a word may have different but related senses considering Aristotle’s view. Chapters 11 and 13 illustrate the meaning of ‘pretending’ and a Plato’s text respectively.
If a flower-streaked inward eye could constitute Wordsworth’s bliss of solitude, the inward voice has fared less glamorously. Its merest mention doesn’t so much conjure up the consolation of inner riches recalled sotto voce as the pathos of this chattering internal radio for the anti-social; a poor comforter of enforced solitariness, or some misanthropist’s illusion of company on his culpable flight from society. Inner speech is the touchstone of a privacy which needn’t depend on the isolation of its silent speaker, for it may mutter forcefully in our ear even when we are among some animated social gathering. The very topic of inner speech conjures an aura of loneliness, whether hapless or wilful. It covers an emotional spectrum shading from the selfconsciousness which eavesdrops on itself to the manias of aural possession. There’s a thick history to this, intersecting with historical fluctuations in the idea of solitude and its worth. At periods the solitary became decorative; so hermits were hired to grace, hairily, the grottoes of eighteenth-century estates. And if there was an acceptable sex of solitude, this wasn’t usually female, unless un sexed by saintliness. But compulsive or enforced sociability is a very modern aim and prescription; on the other hand, some psychoanalytic thought has held to the value of our being able to tolerate being alone.
Literature and the literary have proved singularly resistant to definition. Derek Attridge argues that such resistance represents not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art. In this lively, original volume, the author: considers the implications of regarding the literary work as an innovative cultural event, both in its time and for later generations;. provides a rich new vocabulary for discussions of literature, rethinking such terms as invention, singularity, otherness, alterity, performance and form;. returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues the ethical importance of the literary institution to a culture;. demonstrates how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a 'responsible,' creative mode of reading. The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic.
This book is about the uses to which poetic unintelligibility can be put. By poetic unintelligibility I do not mean poetic difficulty, the resistance with which a text, to a greater or lesser degree, confronts the reader's desire for comprehension, or mastery, or possession. I take as my topic rather a class of features in poems that by definition cannot be assimilated into a positive account of what the poem says or of how it says it. An educated, intelligent, or divine reader could not overcome this different, absolute form of resistance any more readily than a reader ignorant, stupid, or merely mortal. Of course what is by definition unintelligible to one person-say, the night sky-might overflow with meanings for another. In light of this fact, I can specify further what this book will not be about; I will not attempt to adjudicate differences between subjective accounts of the intelligible. That is to say, I will not undertake to distinguish between the different kinds of intelligibility, those meanings, intended or not, to be perceived in the night sky, or an octagonal red sign posted at an intersection, or an infant's cry, or the sudden disappearance of a certain genus of tree frog from a certain rainforest. Instead, by the term unintelligible I designate a specific feature of art, in this case literary, poetic art. Such a feature is one where the intelligibility of the artwork, as an artwork, is not merely delayed or deferred, as in the case of difficulty, but arrested, impeded, obscured, damaged, or destroyed. Such a feature then, is to be known only by contrast to instances where the text can presume its own (present or eventual) clarity, instances where the text makes available the possibility of its assimilation to the reader's understanding. Impossibility, by contrast, is manifest as an unassimilable rupture or tear in the fabric of intelligibility, a rupture or tear in the text itself.
Because I am not silent, George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? InBeing Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems.Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.
This article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator):
“Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris
– Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University
“I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence
– Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
Louise Glück's “I”
– Nick Halpern, North Carolina State University
Jane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass . The full text of her MLA paper itself follows this introduction:
Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed?
In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed? “Let us go then, you and I ”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us go then” addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur , who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the “I”‐position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?
All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's “you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry , the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked.”
The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism , and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry , is that the lyric is pre‐eminently and distinctively the genre of self‐communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric “self” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: “a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three position‐pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.
Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Her essay on Glück's Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.
Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
This article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator):
“Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris
– Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University
“I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence
– Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
Louise Glück's “I”
– Nick Halpern, North Carolina State University
Jane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass . The full text of Nick Halpern's MLA paper itself follows this introduction:
Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed?
In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed? “Let us go then, you and I ”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us go then” addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur , who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the “I”‐position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?
All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's “you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry , the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked.”
The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism , and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry , is that the lyric is pre‐eminently and distinctively the genre of self‐communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric “self” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: “a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three position‐pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.
Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Nick Halpern's essay on Glück's Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.
Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
Poetry is alive in our culture, but in its own world: Never have there been so many poets and poetry readings, books, journals, and online sites. Poetry has certainly seemed threatened, though, in schools and universities, where literary studies focus on prose fiction—narrative has become the norm of literature—or else on other sorts of cultural texts, which can be read symptomatically
Among the letters published for the first time in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is a 1970 missive from Bishop.1 She is reading about Thomas Carlyle, she tells Lowell, and may try to “finish” a “poem about him I’ve had around for years.”2 She never did finish it, however, and the poem is not exactly about “him.” A draft appears posthumously as “Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle,”3 and it narrates an incident taken from Jane Carlyle’s correspondence, in which Thomas meets his wife in a busy street after missing her at “The Swan With Two Necks.”4 Bishop’s worksheets hail that place-name in what seems to be a final stanza, affirming the doubled bird as a symbol of the Carlyles’ relationship—and the epistolary dynamics of that relationship in particular. Bishop suggests the “Swan With Two Necks” as a model of correspondence when she rewrites Jane’s letter’s anecdote about returning with the “mail from Liverpool” at a mail-coach inn.
This poetic draft helps to articulate Bishop’s conception of a correspondent two-ness. Critics have begun to describe the crucial, indeterminate ambit of Bishop’s epistolary transactions: Langdon Hammer describes a productively unspecified “third area” in what is still the best analysis of Bishop’s correspondent practice, and Heather Treseler analyzes a zone of “epistolary relationship” in her study of Bishop’s correspondent poems.5 It is important to note the dyadism of letters, however, in order to understand their implications for Bishop and others of her era. Letters link a particular “I” and a particular “you” rather than dividing a specific “I” from a general “they” (or even a general “we”). With this duality, they articulate a kind of writing that is neither singular nor collective, personal nor political. Letters are ethical, rather, insofar as that term can indicate a principled attention to intersubjective exchange.6 Correspondent ethics provides models of selfhood, morality, and publicity that are particuarly relevant to a writer of Bishop’s time.7 If Bishop seems increasingly central to her era for both critics and subsequent poets, it is in part because she recognizes this epistolary potential—and shows, too, the problems and questions attendant on its realization. These problems mean that Bishop’s ideas of correspondent practice may be most richly evident in the work of one of her correspondents: this essay concludes with a letter-poem by May Swenson, “Dear Elizabeth,” that realizes the epistolary ethics suggested in Bishop’s own writing.
To recognize epistolary ethics is to grant earnest respect to a seemingly casual form, a type of appreciation important to Bishop. As Jonathan Ellis describes, Bishop saw letters as a genre in their own right: in the many letters she wrote, she mentions the many letters she read, including correspondence of Byron, Chekov, Coleridge, Hart Crane, Creevey, Fitzgerald, Hardy, Hopkins, Henry James, Keats, Millay, Sydney Smith, Madame de Sévigné, Stevens, Queen Victoria, Walpole, and Yeats, among others.8 When she taught at Harvard, her one seminar not focused on poetry is titled “Letters: Readings in Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous, from the 16th to the 20th Centuries.”9 Bishop writes (in a letter) that while she plans to include a “nicely incongruous assortment of people” on her syllabus, first among them “Mrs. Carlyle,” she intends to discuss correspondence “as an art form or something”—a phrase that takes letters seriously even as it qualifies their seriousness.10 The paradox fits Bishop’s own career, since her ascendancy as a major writer has been buoyed by celebrations of her minor affect: by 2006, David Orr collects adjectives like “modest” when he declares on the front page of The New York Times Book Review that in “the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop.”11 Appreciation of Bishop, moreover, draws particularly from the “medium” of epistolarity, consolidating around the 1994 publication of her collected letters and continuing through the 2010 reception of Words in Air and the 2011 appearance of her correspondence with The New Yorker.12 This significantly insignificant genre seems as important to...
This article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator):
“Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris
– Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University
“I’ll tell you something”: Reader‐Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence
– Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
Louise Glück's “I”
– Nick Halpern, North Carolina State University
Jane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass . The full text of Willard Spiegelman's MLA paper itself follows this introduction:
Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed?
In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed? “Let us go then, you and I ”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us go then” addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur , who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the “I”‐position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?
All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's “you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry , the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked.”
The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism , and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry , is that the lyric is pre‐eminently and distinctively the genre of self‐communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric “self” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: “a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three position‐pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.
Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Willard Spiegelman's essay on Glück's Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.
Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
This chapter contains section titled: Acknowledgment Notes Works Cited Acknowledgment Notes Works Cited
Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioningâmetaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Glück, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it meansâon the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it. A graceful and skilled study, The Resistance to Poetry honors poetry by allowing it to be what it is. This book arrives at a critical momentâat a time when many people are trying to mold and market poetry into something it is not.
The Body Artist: Louise Glück's Collected Poems
- Dan Chiasson
“The Problem of Sincerity: The Lyric Plain Style of George Herbert and Louise Glück”
- Townsend
“Toward a Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context”
- Perloff
Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric
- Marjorie Perloff
“For a Dollar: Louise Glück in Conversation”
- Glück