Six Poems By Louise Glück, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
The poet received the Nobel Prize in Literature this week.
United States President Barack Obama presents the 2015 National Humanities Medal to Louise Glück
United States President Barack Obama presents the 2015 National Humanities Medal to Louise Glück
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For two years, Louise Glück wrote nothing except a single sentence: "At the end of my suffering / there was a door."
Then, Glück wrote her poetry book "The Wild Iris" in mere weeks.
That story—of death that becomes rebirth, of unfathomable pain that generates a sense of the eternal—is one of the many defining themes of Glück's poems. Her poetry is exceptional because it explores the depths of human emotion and suffering in a way that most of us feel, but rarely see reflected back at us in its true forms. There are no walls in Glück's poetry, no holographs: you're seeing the darkness of pure truth.
Glück's poems offer catharsis but no clear answers. They do not propose that spirituality or even language will save us. Most of them seem to have surpassed the point where their narrators might have been saved; instead, they are picking through broken memories, looking at the world from far above. They are poems for a fractured time, and explorations of the way life continues on even after unfathomable suffering. They are also testaments to the natural world, and to our strange relationships with our bodies and the way they reflect and disobey the earth and sometimes detach from themselves.
This week, Glück's poems earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is far from her first prize; she has been highly lettered throughout her lifetime, receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. The former U.S. Poet Laureate, 77, has also taught at Yale and has been long admired by students of modern poetry.
According to the Swedish Academy, in Glück's poems, "The self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting illusions of the self." They also describe her as "engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life" and "also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss."
Barack Obama, who honored Glück with the National Medal of Arts and Humanities, said that her "probing poems capture the quiet drama of nature and the quiet emotions of everyday people." That so many people resonate with experiences like Glück's—with such quiet shame and deep, profound sadness—is moving to consider, if a bit startling to think about too hard.
Glück will release her next collection of poems, "Winter Recipes From the Collective," next year. "The hope is that if you live through it, there will be art on the other side," she said to The New York Times—"it" being the pandemic, but also possibly the general experience of life.
Read some of Glück's poems below.
