It was still the fly’s fifteen minutes when, into the Twitter storm of Emily Dickinson-meets-Mike Pence jokes (“I heard a fly buzz—when I lied—”), there interposed the news from Stockholm: Louise Glück had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Right on cue, you saw the limits of the written word. I tweeted, “WHHHHHAAAAAATTTTTT.” Others whose life calling it is to manage language were similarly eloquent. The novelist Brandon Taylor wrote “OH. MY. FUCKING. GOD. OH MY GOD. OHHHHH MY GOD.” There were multiple context-free “HOLY SHIT” ’s. Tweets referred to, but couldn’t embody, the emotions: several writers reported that they were crying. My own emotions hadn’t arrived yet at whatever their final form would be. (They still haven’t.) I ran into our front yard to attempt to hail my wife’s car as she and my two sons headed out of the driveway, on the way to the bus. I was too late. I shouldn’t have stopped to pull on pants.
The reasons for the widespread joy are both simple and deep. Simple, because Louise Glück is a great writer who deserves the prize. Her work is thrilling and surprising; it’s both intimate and grand; she appeals to people who read only poetry and to people who read almost no poetry. It is various enough to appeal to all temperaments, often in the same poem: here is a line for the skeptic, here’s one for the pushover. If you want to know what it’s like to fall in love, to have an abortion, to have a child, to be seriously ill, to get divorced, to shop for cheese, to weed, to plant, to grieve for your parents and teachers: you can find it in Glück’s work. Her poems are anathema to easy comfort, and often seem to ban or forbid the going and conventional emotional logic. And yet people read them to know the contours of their own inner lives.
I’ve written about Glück at length; here, though, is a short demonstration, as in a late-night infomercial, of what her poems can do. Several individual poems from her great volume of 1999, “Vita Nova,” carry that book’s title, borrowed from Dante, whose own “new life” began when he first glimpsed Beatrice, his great love. In the final poem of the book, Glück imagines a comic-brutal custody negotiation over a dreamed dog. “In the splitting up dream / we were fighting over who would keep / the dog, / Blizzard”:
“This is all material” is both the specious consolation people offer to suffering artists and writers and, as these very lines demonstrate, the simple truth. Even anorexia, which nearly killed Glück as a young woman, can be a punch line. (Elsewhere in the poem, the dog—a granola, like the mistress who does do the rhumba—won’t touch “the hummus in his dogfood dish.”) Is it a good or a bad thing to “grow up into a poet”? (Today, it certainly seems like a good thing.) But the poem doesn’t end there; its final lines must be some of the most gorgeous sentiments ever expressed about a bitter romantic adversary:
The poem keeps attaching addenda, as though unable to settle on a final note. The seasons provide the model for this abrupt, almost humiliating renewal: winter destroys us, utterly routs us—and then spring pops up all cheerful, like, What was that all about? Let’s just put that unpleasantness behind us!
When I heard the news this morning, I considered another reason for people’s joy. Glück—like the last American woman to win the prize, Toni Morrison—is a teacher, a sage for thousands of students at a variety of institutions, from Goddard College, in its hippie prime, to Williams, Yale, and Stanford. “Teaching,” for figures of her calibre, is often a word that means giving scripted lectures and then fleeing into the wings, or charging mega-dollars for a sun-drenched guru experience at a resort. Glück is a classroom teacher, at home in a small group, around a table. Dozens of great books, winners of awards, were shaped by her vigilant editing in the classroom, which often continues in her apartment and garden in Cambridge. This is part of why so many people seemed to feel that their own lives had somehow been recognized by the announcement of the Nobel.
When I was growing up in Vermont, a few mountains over from her, Glück’s work was everywhere; she still feels to me like a seventies figure, something in the key of Joni Mitchell, because of all the bookshelves and coffee tables of that era where her books were found. She was “our” poet. Now I think of all the waiters and cheesemongers and cabbies and neighborhood people in Cambridge who know her, and think of her as “their” poet. Over many long dinners, I learned from her how to listen, how to formulate a meaningful insight, how to resist the romance of easy or convenient feelings. After attending our wedding, Louise said she’d had a great time because she “loved spectacles of good intention.” When I told her how a friend was courting his new, young wife by reading aloud poems from her book “The Wild Iris,” she laughed and said something like “that book is very useful for people who prefer to view their carnal needs in spiritual terms.” Mommy’s too ironic, but today we’re all pretty blissed out that Louise Glück grew up into a poet.
