Jesse Zuba
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164472
- eISBN:
- 9781400873791
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164472.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter turns to a poet whose work lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, in several respects, from Ashbery's. Here, the chapter focuses on first books to consider subsequent volumes from ...
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This chapter turns to a poet whose work lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, in several respects, from Ashbery's. Here, the chapter focuses on first books to consider subsequent volumes from Louise Glück's oeuvre. The differences between Ashbery and Glück are meant to stress the pervasiveness of the fascination with the vocational trajectory that they share: the same conflicted embrace of career is as legible in the serene disorders of Some Trees as it is in the fierce analyses of Firstborn and throughout the seven collections Glück published leading up to Vita Nova. The logic of Glück's career, the chapter argues, illustrates the double bind of literary professionalism with radical severity.Less
This chapter turns to a poet whose work lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, in several respects, from Ashbery's. Here, the chapter focuses on first books to consider subsequent volumes from Louise Glück's oeuvre. The differences between Ashbery and Glück are meant to stress the pervasiveness of the fascination with the vocational trajectory that they share: the same conflicted embrace of career is as legible in the serene disorders of Some Trees as it is in the fierce analyses of Firstborn and throughout the seven collections Glück published leading up to Vita Nova. The logic of Glück's career, the chapter argues, illustrates the double bind of literary professionalism with radical severity.
Willard Spiegelman
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195368130
- eISBN:
- 9780199852192
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368130.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter analyses American poets' new collection, Louise Glück's The Seven Ages and Jorie Graham's Never. Glück has remained faithful simultaneously to individuality and ordinary experience and ...
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This chapter analyses American poets' new collection, Louise Glück's The Seven Ages and Jorie Graham's Never. Glück has remained faithful simultaneously to individuality and ordinary experience and this double goal affects her subjects and the size of her poems. Graham has always been inclined toward the epistemological dilemmas plumbed and articulated by the English Romantics and in her new volume she revisits Wordsworthian scenes of childhood to develop her ongoing lyrical autobiography with reference to what the Romantics called spots of time.Less
This chapter analyses American poets' new collection, Louise Glück's The Seven Ages and Jorie Graham's Never. Glück has remained faithful simultaneously to individuality and ordinary experience and this double goal affects her subjects and the size of her poems. Graham has always been inclined toward the epistemological dilemmas plumbed and articulated by the English Romantics and in her new volume she revisits Wordsworthian scenes of childhood to develop her ongoing lyrical autobiography with reference to what the Romantics called spots of time.
Dan Chiasson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226103815
- eISBN:
- 9780226103846
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226103846.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Louise Glück is the author of ten books of poetry, including Firstborn (1968) and Averno (2006), and a book of essays, Proofs and Theories (1995). Her most recent books, such as Meadowlands and ...
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Louise Glück is the author of ten books of poetry, including Firstborn (1968) and Averno (2006), and a book of essays, Proofs and Theories (1995). Her most recent books, such as Meadowlands and Averno, show Glück as amply social, funny, and tender as often as she is stern, dispassionate, and ironic. This broader affective range is the result, as this chapter argues, of her interest in narrative. The opportunities presented by telling stories—and the frustrations with having stories told about her—have become central concerns for Glück. No living poet has made lyric poetry answer so fruitfully to the narrative drive. Glück writes poems of alternating ecstasy and self-repudiation. Most recently, in her long poem “Prism,” Glück has developed her long interest in didactic subgenres like riddle and parable, interspersing them with more conventional lyricism to write a non-narrative, indeed “prismatic” autobiography.Less
Louise Glück is the author of ten books of poetry, including Firstborn (1968) and Averno (2006), and a book of essays, Proofs and Theories (1995). Her most recent books, such as Meadowlands and Averno, show Glück as amply social, funny, and tender as often as she is stern, dispassionate, and ironic. This broader affective range is the result, as this chapter argues, of her interest in narrative. The opportunities presented by telling stories—and the frustrations with having stories told about her—have become central concerns for Glück. No living poet has made lyric poetry answer so fruitfully to the narrative drive. Glück writes poems of alternating ecstasy and self-repudiation. Most recently, in her long poem “Prism,” Glück has developed her long interest in didactic subgenres like riddle and parable, interspersing them with more conventional lyricism to write a non-narrative, indeed “prismatic” autobiography.
Jesse Zuba
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691164472
- eISBN:
- 9781400873791
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691164472.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but ...
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“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.Less
“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.
Jahan Ramazani
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226083735
- eISBN:
- 9780226083421
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226083421.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and ...
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Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.Less
Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features. At the same time, they work the tensions between poetry and prayer, tensions between invention and devotion first identified by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century: they skeptically question prayer’s conventions, refuse to subordinate imaginative idiosyncrasy, indulge metaphor and the aesthetic for their own sake, and thus push poetry beyond prayerful norms. Modern and contemporary poetry mobilizes the performative energies of prayer, but steps back from and reframes them, playing in the space between prayer and antiprayer.
Dan Chiasson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226103815
- eISBN:
- 9780226103846
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226103846.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This is a book about the relationship between fact and figure in American poetry. Poetic figuration (and the imaginative activity it emblematizes) seems to be either factual or explicitly afactual, ...
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This is a book about the relationship between fact and figure in American poetry. Poetic figuration (and the imaginative activity it emblematizes) seems to be either factual or explicitly afactual, the mark of renunciation and transcendence in the face of mere fact. The particular class of “autobiographical” facts discussed in this book seem especially mundane, which is to say, especially subject to triumphant transcendence (and erasure) by the imagination. This bias against autobiography seems particularly American or, to be more precise, particularly Americanist. The primary sponsors of this bias would seem to be Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. The breadth of the Whitmanian conception of self, its essentially compound or “cellular” nature, poses a challenge for later writers who would speak more narrowly of their own experiences. In Emerson we see the earliest suggestion that the failure of the imagination and autobiography are causally connected. The poets it features, such as Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O'Hara, become themselves by becoming Whitman, but become Whitman, equally, by becoming themselves.Less
This is a book about the relationship between fact and figure in American poetry. Poetic figuration (and the imaginative activity it emblematizes) seems to be either factual or explicitly afactual, the mark of renunciation and transcendence in the face of mere fact. The particular class of “autobiographical” facts discussed in this book seem especially mundane, which is to say, especially subject to triumphant transcendence (and erasure) by the imagination. This bias against autobiography seems particularly American or, to be more precise, particularly Americanist. The primary sponsors of this bias would seem to be Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. The breadth of the Whitmanian conception of self, its essentially compound or “cellular” nature, poses a challenge for later writers who would speak more narrowly of their own experiences. In Emerson we see the earliest suggestion that the failure of the imagination and autobiography are causally connected. The poets it features, such as Louise Glück, Frank Bidart, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O'Hara, become themselves by becoming Whitman, but become Whitman, equally, by becoming themselves.
Judith Fletcher
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- June 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198767091
- eISBN:
- 9780191821288
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198767091.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Gathering together common themes from works by Barth, Gaiman, Byatt, Selick, Ferrante, Morrison, Bloom, Rushdie, and Patchett, a brief Conclusion reflects on the ubiquity of the descent motif and its ...
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Gathering together common themes from works by Barth, Gaiman, Byatt, Selick, Ferrante, Morrison, Bloom, Rushdie, and Patchett, a brief Conclusion reflects on the ubiquity of the descent motif and its status as a literary space in the context of postmodernism’s critiques of the canon. Underworld mythology lends itself to postmodern interrogations of authenticity, history, and authorial proprietorship. Further uses of the underworld tradition include artist Anish Kapoor’s “Descent into Limbo,” Oliver Sacks’ memoir Awakenings, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less, and Louise Glück’s Averno. The Other Worlds imagined in catabatic fiction contribute to these themes with implied correspondences between dreams and ghosts.Less
Gathering together common themes from works by Barth, Gaiman, Byatt, Selick, Ferrante, Morrison, Bloom, Rushdie, and Patchett, a brief Conclusion reflects on the ubiquity of the descent motif and its status as a literary space in the context of postmodernism’s critiques of the canon. Underworld mythology lends itself to postmodern interrogations of authenticity, history, and authorial proprietorship. Further uses of the underworld tradition include artist Anish Kapoor’s “Descent into Limbo,” Oliver Sacks’ memoir Awakenings, Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less, and Louise Glück’s Averno. The Other Worlds imagined in catabatic fiction contribute to these themes with implied correspondences between dreams and ghosts.
