Illustration by Na Kim.
In her Artwork of Poetry interview in our new Winter problem, Louise Glück expertly captures the psychodynamics between older poets and their perennially youthful college students: “The youthful individual is reminding the older one of many early ferocity of their vocation,” she observes like a practiced analyst, whereas “the older individual is a consultant of stubbornness and persistence and typically a sort of majestic fatigue.”
Glück could not have assumed an air of majestic fatigue once I was her scholar in school three a long time in the past, however my classmates and I definitely all vied, typically with out success, to impress her with our ferocity. She was wry, unfazed by the world’s peculiarities—as I think about she was within the first workshop she ever taught, at Goddard School within the sixties. “Goddard had a unadorned dorm and the category was held there,” she tells her interviewer, Henri Cole, “which didn’t imply my college students have been bare, however that the scholars who lived there have been. When my class met, we might hold our garments on, however it was bizarre to see these bare our bodies going forwards and backwards, not all of them fabulously stunning, I’d add, although they have been all younger.” I prefer to think about the longer term Nobel laureate wanting up from a web page the place some scholar had bared their soul to see others baring their bottoms out the window.
You possibly can snoop on the sort of recommendation Glück would give younger writers, without delay metaphysical and down-to-earth, on this problem: “All the time, one factor to do, in the event you’re caught, is to ask a question within the poem,” she reminds us. “A query shifts the mechanism of the poem.” For extra insights into how poems occur, you may learn our Making of a Poem characteristic with Farid Matuk, whose poem “Crease” you’ll additionally discover within the problem. (“That close to rhyme of love and of was tough for me,” Matuk confides.) Or take a look at our Making of a Poem with the translator Aimee Chor, who introduced Nadja Küchenmeister’s “feathers and planets” to our pages: “The English is in some methods very not like the German,” Chor notes. “Wäscheständer doesn’t sound like laundry rack, and quark isn’t actually the identical factor as cream.”
Additionally in our Winter poetry combine: extra laundry, in Alice Notley’s “The Reply Is Awe”; three poems by Callie Siskel, one other scholar of Glück’s; “faulty items” in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “Water Turns into Water,” translated by Eleanor Goodman; a useless fowl on a doorstep with “one thing / Shifting inside it,” dropped at us by Dorothea Lasky; leporine fisticuffs, courtesy of Angela Ball; and an unsettling posthumous contract signed by Harryette Mullen, which concludes (trace trace) with the speaker’s promise “to pay tribute with choices that verify my dedication and prolong my standing as a devoted subscriber.”
Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Overview.
