{Photograph} by Katherine Wolkoff.
Almost thirty years in the past, throughout my junior yr of faculty, I took a poetry writing class with Louise Glück. I’d by no means learn any of her books, however I used to be conscious of some undergraduate buzz a few visiting poet who’d just lately acquired the Pulitzer Prize for a e book of speaking flowers. Her final home had burned down; her father had made his cash in blades; she would wish somebody to drive her to Star Marketplace for groceries on weekends. (I volunteered as soon as, ready nervously within the parking zone till she returned with a cantaloupe and asparagus.) The particular person I met within the classroom was frighteningly sincere about poetry, and about being a poet. She mentioned it was okay to not write—that she herself had gone a number of years with out writing even a single poem—so it might be completely superb if we didn’t share any poems of our personal together with her that time period. Once we did flip in one thing for workshop, she mercilessly rooted out “mannerisms” in our poems; I grew to become petrified of this critique, which solely made my writing all of the extra mannered. She would linger over particulars like “angels in homespun linen” in a poem by Czesław Miłosz; virtually three a long time later, I nonetheless bear in mind her wry grin of envy at that picture. Greater than the rest, Louise cherished it when one thing was stunning and, looking back, inevitable, as it’s so typically in her work, and in our lives—just like the ending of her poem “Happiness”:
I open my eyes; you might be watching me.
Virtually over this room
the solar is gliding.
Take a look at your face, you say,
holding your personal near me
to make a mirror.
How calm you might be. And the burning wheel
passes gently over us.
Glück’s demise marks a line break, however not a full cease, to a timeless voice within the artwork of poetry. It’s a voice that resonates with the marvel and grief of ancients like Sappho and moderns like Dickinson—in different phrases, like Louise Glück.
Srikanth Reddy is the poetry editor of The Paris Evaluate.
