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Ellen Bryant Voigt on Louise Glück ("Brooding Likeness")
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The last of three episodes in our cluster on Louise Glück: one of her oldest and dearest friends, the marvelous poet Ellen Bryant Voigt joins the podcast to talk about Louise's poem "Brooding Likeness."
Ellen's books of poetry have recently been assembled into a staggering single volume, Collected Poems (Norton, 2023). She is also the author of two books of prose: The Flexible Lyric (Georgia, 1999) and The Art of Syntax (Graywolf, 2009).
A couple notes on things that come up in the episode:
Ellen discusses Louise's autobiographical note for the Nobel Prize. You can find that autobiographical piece here.
We listen, during the episode, to a recording of Louise reading "Brooding Likeness." The recording contains an alternate phrase in its penultimate line, and during the episode Ellen and I surmise that it was an earlier version of the poem than the one that appeared in The Triumph of Achilles.
I've since been able to confirm that. The poem first appeared (with the penultimate line as she reads it here) in The New Yorker on April 12, 1981. The reading we listen to happened on October 22, 1981. The book version, with the version of the line we both prefer, wouldn't be published until 1985.
I hope these three episodes on Glück will add something to the beautiful array of memories that have appeared in writing since her passing. I think the guests speak to each other, even as I talk to them one on one, and they do so through their mutual devotion to the poetry of their friend.
Please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack to get occasional updates on my work.
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Transcript
Introduction to Ellen Bryant Voigt and Louise Glück
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I am really honored today to have Ellen Bryant-Voyt on the podcast. Ellen has very graciously agreed to come on to talk to us about her friend, her late friend, Louise Glick.
Dedication to Louise Glück's Memory
00:00:25
Speaker
So this will form, I think, the last of a cluster of conversations we've had about the great poet Louise Glick since her passing. And Ellen is someone who knew and was very close friends with Louise for many, many years. The poem that Ellen has chosen for us to discuss today is one called Brooding Likeness.
Discussion of 'Brooding Likeness'
00:00:51
Speaker
And it's from an earlier book of Louise's than the other poems we've talked about so far on the series. It's from a book called The Triumph of Achilles, which was published in 1985. But let me tell you before we get to that poem more about our guest today, I'm sure she's well known to many of you.
Ellen Bryant Voigt's Literary Contributions
00:01:11
Speaker
Ellen Bryant Voight is the author of eight volumes of poetry.
00:01:16
Speaker
which have recently been assembled into a staggering and beautiful volume, her collected poems published by Norton just this year in 2023. It's still 2023, I think, yeah. Good.
00:01:33
Speaker
It's a book that I was very moved to receive in the mail. It's a book I've already shared. I mean, not my copy, that one's staying with me, but that I've directed friends towards and have found them enthusiastically responding to me about. It's a book that I heartily recommend to you if you don't have it already.
00:01:58
Speaker
and it collects her whole career to this point. She's also the author of two books of critical prose, one called The Flexible Lyric and another called The Art of Syntax from Grey Wolf's wonderful The Art of X, The Art of Y series.
00:02:19
Speaker
Those books give a poet's guide to what I think is hardest to, I was searching for the right verb here, hardest to understand, hardest to talk intelligently about maybe, it's the sort of thing I think that if you love poetry you have a kind of, some kind of intuitive sense of, but that once you're pressed to put into words becomes quite difficult to sound intelligent about. What am I talking about? What is it
00:02:47
Speaker
that makes a phrase sound right. And what phrasing, you know, the order we put our words into syntax, what that has to do with the topic of poetic lineation, the other organizing principle that many, most poems have, I say many or most as a qualifier because we've just talked about a, with Lanny Hammer, talked about a prose poem.
00:03:16
Speaker
by Louise Glick. And then how it is that both of those things, syntax, line break, make in their kind of strange relation the thing we call lyric poetry.
Poetic Connections and Friendship with Louise
00:03:35
Speaker
Ellen and I almost met each other fairly recently, where we were both at Breadloaf this summer,
00:03:46
Speaker
Ellen, as the much-belorelled guest-reader, she gave just an incandescent reading of poetry, I think, on the conference's first night. I was in the audience for it and found myself
00:04:03
Speaker
blown away by the power of her poems and far too shy to introduce myself to her afterwards. I think then what happened, but Ellen can correct me later if I've got it wrong, is that I gave a lecture that I think she may not have been present
00:04:22
Speaker
four, that's right, I see her nodding, but that was recorded and that she listened to the recording of and then she reached out to me and it turns out of course we have all kinds of mutual interests and ways of thinking about poetry and so thus began a correspondence between us.
00:04:41
Speaker
And then into the middle of it, of course, came this terrible news that Louise Glick, who is, to me, a poet I admire, to Ellen, that and much, much more, but a very dear friend, had passed away. And as I started to put these
00:05:00
Speaker
Conversations together, I thought, who better to talk to than one of Louise Gluck's oldest friends and a wonderful poet in her own right, Alan Bryant Voight. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Award, for the Pulitzer Prize, and she's been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim,
00:05:21
Speaker
and MacArthur Foundations. Ellen lives in Vermont, but joins us tonight. We're recording at night from St. Paul, Minnesota. Ellen, Bryant, Voight, welcome to my podcast. How are you feeling tonight? Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
00:05:42
Speaker
Well, it's like I said, a real honor for me to have you here. I wonder if we might begin, Ellen. By now, I suspect, well, by now, most people who see fit to listen to this podcast probably have some idea already of who Louise Glick was and what her poetry is like.
00:06:08
Speaker
I wonder if we could begin with my asking you to tell us a little bit about who this person was from your perspective. How was it that you came to know, Louise? And when was that? And what was your friendship like? I was teaching at Goddard College, and this was in the days of the hippie flourishing, I guess you could say.
00:06:34
Speaker
that there was a lot of experimental stuff that was going on and a lot of stuff going on in the arts. And this was in Vermont. And I came there with my husband who had a job. We had just finished doing our graduate work and applied. We had a variety of jobs we applied for.
00:06:54
Speaker
There was one available. There was one open at Goddard College. So we took it and moved to Vermont. And as soon as we got here, I thought, I want to stay here the rest of my life. This is where I want to be. And so at the college at the time, there was a lot of ferment that was going on in the arts. It was a good place. We had a lot of young poets, young fiction writers.
00:07:24
Speaker
And we had a big festival every spring. It was over a weekend and we would ask people to come and offer them, you know, pull out sofas in somebody's basement and travel expenses and not a whole lot more. But at that time I was teaching undergraduates and
00:07:47
Speaker
I was teaching Louise's first book. So when, when my colleagues ask if I had a recommendation for whom I come to the festival, I said, yes, let's bring Louise, Louise Glick. And so. Have you met her yet or? No, I never met her. I only knew about her book. And do you remember what it was like to come across that book for the first time or, you know, do you, can you recall your first read your first experience reading her?
00:08:18
Speaker
No, I don't think so. I've read too much in the years since. Well, that's fascinating. So I interrupted your story. Go on. So you said, let's invite Louise Glick. Let's invite Louise. And so she came.
00:08:30
Speaker
And in her little memoir, her autobiography that she did for the Nobel, she says that that was the year that Baryman came. And I know that Baryman did come one year while when we were doing this. I didn't remember that it was the very first year that she came.
00:08:50
Speaker
I think Jim Tate was there. I think Charlie Simic was there. They lived fairly close. If it was the year that Berryman came, well, one year Berryman did come and he was driven up there by his good friend, William
00:09:06
Speaker
Meredith who came along to try to keep him sober so he had not been sober very long and There was an exchange with Louise that I'll tell this story because it's I think it gives you a sense of of her as a person at the time. Yes, please there Berryman was was very taken of course with her and
00:09:30
Speaker
and tried at one of the parties, tried to flirt with her. And so his attempt was to say to her, well, Louise, what do you have to recommend yourself besides your beautiful white body?
00:09:46
Speaker
And she did not take to that well at all. And she bristled. And when she did, he chastised
Louise Glück's Teaching Journey
00:09:53
Speaker
her and said, he said, oh, Louise, can't you be teased? And she said back, oh, John, can't you be chastised? So she was already very much a presence, very much clear of who she was and what she was going to put up with and what she was not.
00:10:14
Speaker
That's an amazing story. So, and would this have been the early 1970s? I should, I should know these dates. Yes, I think that was around 71. I think what she says in her, in her account. And I have no reason to think that that's happening. So I think that that must have been, and I had been there, I came in 1969. So I've been there for two years. And she makes reference in her little piece about, you know,
00:10:42
Speaker
drunken English teachers who said, why don't you come back and teach? But in fact, Goddard had overbooked for students. We had students coming out of the windows everywhere around. So we needed teachers. We needed people on the faculty. And even though she had no advanced degrees, Goddard at the time prodded itself on being an experimental college.
00:11:09
Speaker
So it was a place where, you know, she could teach and she found that she loved teaching and she was very good at it. She was she was a passionate and dedicated teacher. So, you know, she she had then a following all the different places where she taught. She taught at Williams. She taught at Yale. She taught at Harvard. She taught at BU. She started taught at Stanford. She's somewhere else in California, I think wasn't Berkeley, but
00:11:40
Speaker
Well, we had, as in an earlier conversation in the series, we had one of her students from Yale, Elisa Gonzalez, on. And so it's quite moving, actually, to Yale as her last sort of full-time op to hear about that, and then to hear you talk about what the very beginning of her teaching career was like. Yes, going right away, right away, right away.
00:12:05
Speaker
And so the two of you struck up a friendship,
Evolution of Ellen and Louise's Friendship
00:12:08
Speaker
I take it. Yes, we did. Well, one of the things she also talks in her, this autobiographical piece, about the coincidence of things, when she came to Vermont in 1971, then she had been
00:12:25
Speaker
She had been at Provincetown and that was not a happy place to be at the time because she was not writing down there and found it very hard to write. And she had been a student herself of Stanley Kunitz and that she was very afraid that this was the end of her writing, that she would not write anymore. And then she talks about having gone to a music camp when she was in high school.
00:12:54
Speaker
So when she came in 1971 for this occasion of a weekend festival, she felt at home. She felt very much at home and she also started to write again and teaching encouraged that. So she found that she was good at teaching and she liked teaching and so that sort of released something in her for her own work.
00:13:21
Speaker
We're accustomed, I guess, to hearing of people in general, but perhaps writers in particular who, quote, unquote, have to teach, that teaching is a sort of demand that pulls away from the energy one has left over for writing. But in the story that you're telling, for Louise at least, in this particular way, it was somewhat different. Teaching enabled the creative process. It totally did, yes.
00:13:51
Speaker
And something about Vermont, I noticed that you said that once you got there, to Goddard, you thought, oh, this feels right. I want to stay. I want to stay. That's right. And evidently she did too. Do you think it was some of the same things that were attractive to you and to her? I mean, was your experience of Vermont similar, do you think?
00:14:11
Speaker
I think so. I mean, the thing about Vermont is that it's physically very, very beautiful. So if you are drawn to landscape, there's no better place to be. And there's also a tolerance. She talks about this a little bit too, a tolerance for eccentricity. People will leave you alone. If you want solitude, they will let you have solitude.
00:14:41
Speaker
We laugh about that, that, you know, the taciturn, Yankee, and you get them started talking, they won't shut up. I mean, they will talk on and on and on. But if they sense that you would rather be quiet and be still, they will let you do that.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, so let's move on a bit through the years as you both began to spend more and more time in each other's company. What was it like to be friends? What was it like to share meals together, to share days together? Well, she was a great cook. And she also, whatever was left over from the anorexia, the anorexia really
00:15:27
Speaker
That was about control. Apparently, that is what anorexia is, more than anything to do with food. And I should say, sorry to interrupt, but just for people who are curious, that the piece that Ellen has referred to a couple of times now, the autobiographical essay that Louise Glick wrote once she won the Nobel Prize and that's posted on their website, I will make available to listeners so that you can read it as well. And in that piece, she discusses
00:15:59
Speaker
suffering from anorexia in late adolescence and recovering with some effort and difficulty from that. A great deal of difficulty, yes. Sorry for the interruption. I just wanted to make sure people knew what we
Louise Glück's Personal Challenges
00:16:16
Speaker
were referring to. Go on.
00:16:18
Speaker
Yes, and the other thing too is that while she was in Provincetown on a trip back to the city, to New York City, she had a grand mal seizure. And over a period of time, it took a little while for it to be diagnosed, but then she was diagnosed with epilepsy. So Louise didn't drive.
00:16:42
Speaker
And one of the things about living in Vermont, especially if you live out in the countryside, which is where Plainfield is, you need some friends who will drive you around. So I was one of those friends and could drive her around. And so I got to spend a lot of time with her that way. Was she talkative as a passenger?
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah, she was. She was talking about it as a passenger. Yeah, she was. Yeah. Well, I feel as though you learn a lot about somebody when you drive with them. You do. Yeah. You do. It's also, you know, it is that therapeutic model where it was Sullivan, I think, where you both
00:17:26
Speaker
both people are facing forward, and you face forward on the same object, and then as both are recording the object, then that allows for more peripheral exchange. Something like that, I guess. Oh, that's so beautiful, and it's exactly right. It's not quite the psychoanalytic model of not seeing the analyst being out of sight altogether.
00:17:51
Speaker
The the interlocutor is there in your peripheral vision. Yeah, and you share an object of attention I found this with my teenage children Very often that this is when I could find out a whole lot more much more forthcoming I was not my gaze was not directed at them but we were together focused on something else and then in that space these other things could happen and
00:18:17
Speaker
It's such a beautiful image that, you know, of course I want to linger with it and I don't have a poet's instinct and I'll probably kill it of its beauty if we're not careful, but there is something I think
00:18:32
Speaker
in this image about where I'm tempted to read it allegorically also, that is that there's some sense in which the shared object of attention is not just the road ahead, but is poetry or life. And that was the time then, I mean, over these years when
00:18:55
Speaker
We were exchanging manuscripts who were each other's first readers. And we could do that fairly easily. And I could just drive over to her house and take the latest drafts of something and show them to her. And she could show me hers.
00:19:14
Speaker
And what was that experience like of sharing work in progress? She's an amazing reader. She's an amazing reader. She's completely intolerant. She was completely intolerant of anything conventional. So she would keep you on your toes and so
00:19:35
Speaker
whether those conventions were the styles of the day or traditional meters and things like that. I mean, to just do it because it was a convention, you know, that was anathema to her.
00:19:49
Speaker
And I take it that was a useful perspective for you to have. It was. Yeah. And what do you think, and maybe it's a strange question to ask, and these things are always easier. It's easier to answer the question that I just asked you, yes. But now if I turn the tables and say, what is it that you think your attention might have contributed to Louise, where she was at that moment in her career as a poet?
00:20:19
Speaker
I think clarity, she had a great tolerance for ambiguity, higher than mine. So I think that, I mean, where I would press her, I would say, who is this speaking now? Who is this person? Who is this person? And particularly when she got into the use of myth, when she was using myth,
00:20:47
Speaker
I didn't know those myths as well as she did. I didn't have anybody read them to me when I was a child, which she did. But it sounds like that perspective must have been an important one because of course not every reader would either, right? Yeah. It's got to be there in the poem if it's going to work. I hope so. I hope that I probably heard that.
00:21:12
Speaker
Well, I'm sure that was a beautiful gift. Let me ask a different kind of question. You know, I invited you on and you so graciously accepted, and then you thought a little bit about different poems we might discuss.
00:21:27
Speaker
What led, a number of, or a couple of them anyway, came from the same volume. I wonder if you might be willing to talk a bit about, it's always an impossible thing to say, oh, come on my podcast and you can pick one poem. What factors were you considering in making your decision of poem?
00:21:54
Speaker
Well, I thought to pick something characteristic of this book. Why this book, I guess would be the follow-up question on that. I mean, she had already done two other books, very well received. And she hasn't yet gotten to Ararat. And Ararat is the one that she had a lot of pushback on.
00:22:22
Speaker
Because there again, if you're going to be very careful, if you're going to be scornful, don't be scornful of this Jewish culture that you grew up in. I don't know that it's entirely that, but there were a lot of people who had praised the earlier books.
00:22:45
Speaker
who then really disagreed about Ararat, including Cunets. And in his view, of course, mattered a lot to her. Right. And so she was working on these poems while you two were finding your way as friends, while you were on those car rides together. Yes, coming around.
00:23:10
Speaker
I know that there's at least one poem in this volume that seems to have been dedicated to an EV, whom I suspect is our guest today. The poem that we'll talk about in a moment isn't that poem, but clear anyway that the friendship must run throughout the book.
00:23:34
Speaker
I have one last question before we get to the poem itself, Ellen, and I hope it's not too strange a question to ask but, you know, you lost your friend and as anyone who's lost someone dear to them knows that it's a dreadful thing and people do all kinds of things in the wake of such losses. I wonder if you've been spending any time reading Louise's poems
00:24:05
Speaker
Well, since learning of her illness or finding out about her death, which followed so shockingly swiftly upon her diagnosis, if you have been reading her poems since she passed, I wonder what that experience has been like for you. Has it been a comfort? Is that not the right word for it? Has it been something else? No, not a comfort. I wish it were a comfort.
00:24:34
Speaker
I have a friend who's about my age who said to me when she learned about Louise's death, she said, well, you know, you writers, at least you have the poems, you have the record. But I have not found it a comfort. I have found it not a comfort. There won't be any more.
00:25:02
Speaker
And that is profound to me, that's the profound loss. Yeah, we do have all of those, but we won't have more. Right. Well, I'm so dreadfully sorry for your loss and for all of our loss. It is. I think it's a great loss to poetry. I mean, she was a great poet. She set out to be a great poet.
00:25:27
Speaker
It cost her minorly. There were other things that she put second. She was determined that she would be a great poet, and she knew she could be. And, you know, when you're young, I mean, we all think the same thing. We all think, well, you know, I can be hot stuff. I mean, just do whatever I can to do the best I can. But she had a supreme confidence
00:25:56
Speaker
And she had a kind of faith. She had a belief in, I guess, destiny. That's very Greek. I mean, that's another reason why, you know, the poems out of this book seem to me really catch her at that age. You know, it's sort of, this is destined. This is destined to be. And you know, it might as well be something out of
00:26:18
Speaker
the Iliad or something, you know, here's this one and here's this Greek and this guy, and how would you not go out in battle? Of course you would, you know, because otherwise, you know, you would be dishonoring your, you know, what you meant to do.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah, I find so much of interest in her poems, the kind of heroic or the nature of the poems or the devotion to this sort of feeling of kind of fate or destiny is something that
00:26:59
Speaker
is quite palpable here. I'm laughing in part because I know she's told the story more than once of having gone to a fortune teller. I took her. You took her. Well, then you tell the story. Well, this was a local woman named Luvia, Luvia Leferia, French-Canadian, and she was known for finding things. If you lost something, she was known for finding it.
00:27:27
Speaker
So all of us had got it. Of course, everybody had got it. We were totally into that. We were totally into any kind of system of superstition and, you know, this was the age of Aquarius. 1971, right. Yeah, okay. So you took her to Livia. I took her to Livia, yes. And how did that go? Well, Livia told her
00:27:51
Speaker
Whatever the number of books she talks about that too in that piece. Yeah, right. She says you'll write five more books Yeah, I mean where that was one of the questions and with luvia when you went you always wrote out questions for her and During the the reading luvia would hold your hand and
00:28:16
Speaker
and pretend to be reading your palm. But she didn't really read your palm. We don't know what she did. But the thing about Luvia was everybody knew she would answer all three of your questions before the end of the session without you having to tell her what those questions were. Amazing.
00:28:34
Speaker
So I had been to her before, and I have my own poem about going to Luvia, but in this case she said to Louise, well, I mean one of Louise's questions was, how many books will I write?
00:28:50
Speaker
You know, will I be famous? How many books will I write? And Luvia said, you will write five, or whatever it was, the number. Luis is correct. I think that's it. I don't know if it's five more or five total, but yeah, the number is five. I think it's total. It's total. So at first, she's very pleased with this. Well, great, because she writes... Five books? Yeah. Sure, that's a lot. We both wrote very, very slowly, and we're thinking, well, that'll be pretty good, you know, get five books out of it.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah, she said she did the math, right? Okay, won every so-and-so years, that'll get you to the age of whatever, and that's a good run. And then when she hit five, then it was doomsday, because then she thought, oh, I'll never write another book. Right, yeah. But of course that didn't stop her, she just changed gears, and that's where there's that wonderful poem that says,
00:29:40
Speaker
And then I moved to Cambridge. And that's the way we begin Vita Nova, a new life. We have a new life. Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful. I'm so glad I brought that up. I hadn't realized it was you who took her. But of course, I should have known. OK. Alan Bryant Voigt, let's listen to Louise read the poem you've chosen for us today. The poem is called Brooding Likeness.
00:30:07
Speaker
Listeners, it's a brief poem. It's just 13 lines, I think. I will make the text of it available to you as well so you can look in the episode notes and click on a link I'll put for you there if you want to look at it as we listen to Louise Reed. Once the recording has finished, we'll talk about it. Here's Louise Glick. This is a poem called, Brooding Likeness.
00:30:36
Speaker
I was born in the month of the bull, the month of heaviness, or of the lowered, the destructive head, or of purposeful blindness. So I know beyond the shadowed patch of grass, the stubborn one, the one who doesn't look up, still senses the rejected world. It is a stadium, a well of dust,
00:31:08
Speaker
And you who watch him, looking down in the face of death, what do you know of commitment? If the pearl lives one controlled act of revenge, be satisfied that in the sky, like you, he is always moving, not of his own accord, but in the world's eyes, like grit caught on a wheel, like shining freight.
00:31:39
Speaker
So that's Louise Gluck reading Breeding Likeness. And I just noticed this, perhaps you did, Ellen, that there's one change. There's a change. We can come to that. So in the world's eyes, she says. All right. Okay. We'll come back to that. What do you hear in her voice, Ellen, just in the sort of, I mean, in the literal speaking voice here, that as you listen to the recording, what do you notice?
00:32:08
Speaker
What was it like to listen to Louise read a poem? Well, I mean, again, I think that this was a period in which her reading style was very vatic, you know, sort of like the voice of the Sphinx. And so, I mean, I can hear that.
00:32:32
Speaker
That wasn't what she sounded like in the car as you were driving around playing field. No, the other poem that I had talked to you about out of this book that did sound more like in the car is that poem called Baskets, which we thought would be hard to find, hard to locate. Might be. And a little bit long to do.
00:32:54
Speaker
But that had more of her wit in it, her humor. This doesn't have a lot of humor in it. This is, you know, this is, you know, the voice. Where is this voice coming from almost? Yes, it sounds like, yeah. And it's also, I can, the other thing I can tell you right away, I was born in the month of the bull. What a line. The month of heaviness. What that is, is a reference to, I mean, Louise was quite an expert in astrology.
00:33:23
Speaker
And so she's talking about the signs of the zodiac. So this is the zodiac. This is a Taurus. I'm also a Taurus. We were both Tauruses. So that's what that is. Yeah, Louis was born on April 22nd. Yeah, April 22nd, yeah. So just at the beginning of Taurus there. I know that because I'm an Aries, which runs from March 21st to April 19th. Yes, that's right.
00:33:50
Speaker
So, yeah, the month, and it's fun, I want to say, well, April is partly the month of Aries too, but no, not for her, it's Taurus, yeah. Taurus, the month of heaviness, the Lord, the destructive head, purposeful blindness, all of those are Taurian characteristics, you know, that Taurus is very loyal, he's also completely stubborn,
00:34:18
Speaker
So I know beyond the shadowed patch of grass, the stubborn one, the one who doesn't look up, still senses the rejected world. It is a stadium, a well of dust. And again, this is not voice from the car.
00:34:38
Speaker
No, I wouldn't think so. There's something about those opening lines. So yeah, it's not the voice in the car. Then the question I think that follows is, well, what is it? How can we describe what it is? There's something in those opening lines that's sort of announcing
00:35:02
Speaker
I mean, in a way it's sort of, one way to think about it anyway is that the sort of project it's embarking on is in a way not so different from the project embarked upon in the autobiographical essay that we've referred to now a couple of times on the Nobel site that says, you know, I was born in such and such a place and these were my siblings and these were my parents and so forth. It's also not so different from
00:35:32
Speaker
what might feel like a standard or kind of fundamental project that lyric poetry has to say who I am. But this is such a peculiar version of that. I was born in the month of the bull, the month of heaviness. So I get the kind of astrological Torian attributes.
00:36:00
Speaker
I'm curious about, well, for one thing, what you think heaviness as a concept might have meant to Louise in this moment. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just gonna leave the question at that and see what that word is doing for you, heaviness. What do you think heaviness meant to this poet?
00:36:31
Speaker
Too hard a question. Because she seems to me to be a poet who's sort of often interested in cutting away, stripping down. Heaviness seems surprising to me in that context. Do you have any thoughts about that word?
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't have a good reading of it beyond what you have. I mean, what follows it is or of the lowered
00:37:07
Speaker
Actually, the way she pronounced that word, it almost sounded like the word lowered almost sounded to me like the word Lord. Lord. The lowered, destructive head, or of purposeful blindness. The series of the or, or kind of rhythm is interesting to me. Or of, or of, or of. The month of, or of, or of. The month of what? The month of. This is a little list. A month of heaviness. A month, or of.
00:37:37
Speaker
the Lord, the destructive head, or of purposeful blindness, take your peak. But they're not different from one another. They're the same. Ah, that was the question. Yeah, they're the same, you think, yeah. They're not the same. And that, to my mind, that's sort of foreshadowing what she does at the end, like grit caught on a wheel like shining freight. Let's say it twice. Let's say it twice. It's very insistent. Oh, what a beautiful word for it. It's an insistent poem.
00:38:06
Speaker
Very insistent, very insistent. Yeah. And right in the middle, too, this is this kind of turn, which to me is sort of reminiscent of, you know, what can happen with a sonnet. You will watch him looking down in the face of death. What do you know of commitment? What do you know of commitment? That's a way of saying, I know commitment. You don't know commitment. I know it. Again, it's kind of an announcement.
00:38:35
Speaker
Yeah, oh, absolutely. So let's pause there for a minute. And so this comes just about the midpoint of the poem. And you who watch him looking down in the face of death, what do you know of commitment? This is a question that doesn't, I don't think has a kind of literal answer, but so we're getting the sense of the eye here is this kind of, well, it's in some sense Louise,
00:39:02
Speaker
In some sense, it's this mythic, kind of vatic, oracular sort of speaker. Who is the you? Who is that I setting herself up in opposition to? What's that you like? Is it? The rest of the world. The whole rest of the world. Everybody else in the world.
00:39:31
Speaker
Louise did have that side, which was almost imperious, you know? Uh-huh, uh-huh. And imperious is a lovely word for it. Is it also a condition of suffering? I mean, to be alone, to think of yourself as separate from the rest of the world.
00:39:59
Speaker
Yeah, the catchphrase in our house was always, you would not want to be Louise. You know, you would not want her life. You would not want to be Louise. No, it's so again, that's back to that sense of destiny. This is destined. This is the way it should be. There's something that gets fixed and it gets fixed early on.
00:40:25
Speaker
I don't know entirely what those things were beyond what she's written about. Clearly, her mother's fear that came from the loss of the first child.
00:40:39
Speaker
that, you know, then focused on Louise as that something would happen to Louise. And as Louise said about herself, she said that she was a hypochondriac. And I think it just instilled an anxiety in her. But she countered that with this sense of destiny. I don't know any other word for it. Oh, that's fascinating. Destiny as a – well,
00:41:06
Speaker
I say this as someone who can be understood as hypochondriac myself, so I'm speaking from a position of deep sympathy here. But hypochondriism is also
00:41:21
Speaker
I mean, in a way, it's a kind of belief in destiny too. It's just the destiny isn't good, right? You think, oh, I am fated for something awful. Something awful will happen to me. I'm waiting for signs of it. There's a kind of paranoid reading where everything seems a sign of catastrophe.
00:41:41
Speaker
So what you say, though, is that there is this other kind of destiny that Louise is imagining, sort of willing into existence or imagining or apprehending somehow that she's fated for something great. Yes. And it's a kind of counterweight against the worry or the anxiety. Yes, that's right. Yes, I think so. And it also, I mean, I can tell you this, that the last week of her life
00:42:12
Speaker
We were expecting her to come back to Vermont.
Louise Glück's Acceptance of Terminal Illness
00:42:17
Speaker
We had terrible floods this summer. And so she had to leave and go back to Cambridge. And she was due to come in October. And on October the 1st, she wrote to me and said, I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to make our October date.
00:42:39
Speaker
because I've just been diagnosed with metastatic cancer. And I wrote back immediately and said, metastatic cancer, had you been ill? And she responded right away and said that it was found on an ultrasound that she had a very good doctor and she had had some mild but persistent
00:43:05
Speaker
symptoms and so he had just as a precaution he had done an ultrasound and that's when he found that it was metastasized already and Her comment about that to me was that she felt very calm She said I feel very calm. She said surprisingly. I feel very calm and She said I think living to be 80 is achievement enough and then she also said
00:43:43
Speaker
She said, I've had a good life. So there's something in that about, you know, even then right at the, you know, toward the end that, and I think, I mean, I believe all of that was absolutely true for her. It's just incredibly moving. Um, there's, um, you know, uh,
00:44:13
Speaker
I don't want to make this about me. I have been public and have written about the loss of my sister, who also had great anxiety over the course of her life leading up to the time of her diagnosis about health issues. And so I sort of witnessed firsthand what it was like
00:44:38
Speaker
to see someone who could suffer in this way be told, well, this time it's actually happening. Yes, that's right. One of the exchanges with Louise that she sent to me that she said, she said, at least I know now I won't have, and then she listed a whole number of things. She said, I won't have to worry about Alzheimer's. I won't have to worry about debilitating stroke.
00:45:08
Speaker
and she named them all. And by naming them all, it was like there you could see it, all of that dread. She'd been carrying that around. Yeah, for all those years. Oh God, yeah. Almost impossible to return to the poem at a moment like this, but I think actually there's something in it for us. So I don't wanna,
00:45:35
Speaker
I mean, I'm just so kind of, I keep using this word, moved by your account of what Louise was saying in those last days.
Louise's Sense of Destiny and Taurus Symbolism
00:45:45
Speaker
And I'm reading the lines here somewhat earlier from where we were just focused. So I know beyond the shattered patch of grass, the stubborn one, the one who doesn't look up,
00:46:01
Speaker
Again, I guess she's still describing the sort of her Torian self or something. That one who doesn't look up, then back to her words, still senses the rejected world.
00:46:16
Speaker
So what are we to make of that, Ellen? She has on the one hand rejected the world because she's so intently, stubbornly focused on her own little parcel of land or patch of life, but she still senses it as it were, apprehends it peripherally or something, yeah. Yeah.
00:46:44
Speaker
It is a stadium, a well of dust. See, that has no sensuality in it, you know? And she was, she loved to eat, she loved to cook, you know, she loved music. Those are also Tarian, you know, earthbound traits. But there was this side of her that had in its private moments these
00:47:10
Speaker
That image, a stadium, a well of dust, it's almost an image of emptiness or something. Total emptiness, yes. Total emptiness. And you who watch him, that address which you're taking, and I'm totally persuaded by it, that you is the rest of the world, everyone who isn't me. Yes, everyone else. Then we get those lines. What do you know of commitment?
00:47:38
Speaker
So she knows commitment, what do you know? You know commitment, that's it. If the bull lives one controlled act of revenge, revenge, was her, I mean, is there a way of understanding her creative impulse as being allied with revenge in some sense, Ellen, or what are you getting out of that word, revenge?
00:48:07
Speaker
I don't know. I really don't know about revenge other than it seems to me that this bull here is a bull from the bullfights. Isn't this what that is? Maybe so. I mean, I was thinking about the Taurus and so on. And if mythology is important to her here, and I'm not sure that it is, so the Greek myth
00:48:37
Speaker
The Minotaur? Well, there's that, and sort of related to that, there is, so Zeus becomes interested in Europa. Yes. And in order to take her away, depending on what era of translation or commentary this is, the word would either be seduce or rape, but in order to take her away,
00:49:03
Speaker
he transforms into a bull and joins the flock, and she pets him, and she gets up on his back, and then he flies away with her and takes her to Crete. So then there is the minotaur story, too. And then the constellation of the bull, Taurus, has something to do with that story, at least. Yeah, I think that's very probable, because there's also a poem in here about
00:49:32
Speaker
Is it Daphne who turns into a tree? Yeah. And we know of her long-standing interest in Greek mythology to say nothing of the fact that the book is called The Triumph of Achilles.
00:49:45
Speaker
Clearly that's the landscape we're in. I don't know if that helps with revenge. I hear it almost in the voice too, that idea of a sort of sustained act of control and there being a kind of
00:50:04
Speaker
rage in it or something, a kind of controlled fury, Nina. Yes, yes. Is like what she sounds like. Be satisfied that in the sky, like you, he is always moving. Then we get to the final lines. Well, then the changed line, not of his own accord, but through the black field. Uh-huh.
00:50:29
Speaker
And then what she read was changed, right? Different? Yeah. You know what? It's short enough. We can listen to it again. Let's listen to it one more time, and then we'll talk about the ending. Actually, that plays right there. Yeah, good. This is a poem called Brooding Likeness. I was born in the month of the bull, the month of heaviness, or of the lord, the destructive head,
00:50:59
Speaker
or of purposeful blindness. So I know beyond the shadowed patch of grass, the stubborn one, the one who doesn't look up, still senses the rejected world. It is a stadium, a well of dust. And you who watch him looking down in the face of death,
00:51:27
Speaker
What do you know of commitment? If the pearl lives one controlled act of revenge, be satisfied that in the sky, like you, he is always moving, not of his own accord, but in the world's eyes, like grit caught on a wheel, like shining freight.
00:51:52
Speaker
in the world's eyes rather than through the black field. Well, you're the poet, Ellen. Did she make a good change? No, I don't like that change. It shifts the point of view. Sorry, you don't like which. I take it that my assumption, and I should find out, I can and will find out, not right now, but afterwards, and I'll let you know in the episode notes when I put out the episode,
00:52:20
Speaker
What the date of the recording is but what I'm sort of as my working theory here Ellen And you tell me if this sounds right is that the reading must be before the published version of the book that that she that I doubt Unless you think it's likely that she's the kind of poet who would have done it that she would have published it in one form and then changed it in a reading afterwards I think maybe more likely that she had a version that she was reading and she made a final change for publication
00:52:50
Speaker
That is more likely. So, well, in any case, we don't need to trouble ourselves with which came first, but you prefer what's printed rather than what she read. I do. Tell us why. What she read changes the point of view. Yeah. But through the black field, then be satisfied that in the sky, like you, he is always moving, not of his own accord, but through the black field,
00:53:18
Speaker
That's where he is. I'm telling you that this is the case. Through the black field is a really beautiful way to describe the night sky as a black field. Totally. Yeah. Yes, it goes back to the whole thing with the zodiac. Like grit caught on a wheel. Like shining freight in the doubling there too.
00:53:42
Speaker
So I like that much better than, but in the world's eyes, not of his own accord, but in the world's eyes, like grid caught on a wheel. The world thinks it's like grid caught on a wheel. No, the speaker thinks it, I think. Yeah. And the poem thinks it. The poem thinks it, yes. Now we think it too. Yes.
00:54:06
Speaker
I agree with you. I get to be the critic here. I think the version in the book is better.
00:54:18
Speaker
I want to stay with the last line a moment longer. There's that doubled simile, like grit caught on a wheel, like shining freight. In a way, it sort of reminds me of that anaphoric structure that we were getting earlier, or of the lowered, or of the this. It's like this, and it's what you were describing earlier as the sort of insistent method.
00:54:43
Speaker
Do those two similes feel equivalent to you? I mean, talk about their relation to each other, the ones in the Final Land. Is like grit caught on a wheel? How does that feel to you relative to like shining freight? Is one a clarification of the other or two swings of the axe at the same tree? I think the second, two swings of the axe.
00:55:14
Speaker
Grit caught on the wheel takes us back to the astrology and the sky and what's up there. The wheel, the turning wheel of the stars, in other words. Yeah, the stars. Though it's on the other hand, such a kind of homely or, I mean, taken out of context of the poem, right? Let's just say you encountered that phrase somewhere in the world, like grit caught on a wheel. You wouldn't be thinking of celestial things. You would be thinking of the thing that got stuck in your tire.
00:55:45
Speaker
But then Shining gives us stars again. Yeah, it does. Shining Freight. But she does that a lot. And if I go two poems down to another poem, I'll just read you this little piece that says, and this is about Mary, it's about Christmas, winter morning.
00:56:11
Speaker
He says, so the thoughts went on from each question came another question, like a twig from a branch, like a branch from a black trunk. So two things, two things. Two things. Yeah, there is something...
00:56:28
Speaker
I love the word insistent. I also want to say that it feels somehow, and I'm not exactly sure how, as I start to say this out loud, related to me to this idea of the fatedness of life. Like if I believe that life works that way, even if it's a kind of leap of faith or a thing I'm willing to believe in order to do my work, then I might think, well, if I've described something well once,
00:56:55
Speaker
If I describe it well again, it will sort of necessarily be kind of isomorphic with it. It will be the same thing again, but from a different point of view, because I've caught the real, the way things really are. I'm sort of attached to, it's the sort of notion of fadedness again. Well, isn't that one of the primary principles of rhetoric anyway?
00:57:21
Speaker
Is that you, you know, say it once, you say it twice. You emphasize, right? I think so. Say it once, when you say it again, say what you said, say what you want to say, and then say what you said and say it again.
00:57:35
Speaker
Yeah, but the trick of it, of course, I mean, I say this as someone who in my day job, you know, often finds myself teaching college students how to write good essays and that kind of thing. And I say, you know, I don't want to hear at the end of an essay, you simply repeat yourself. Yeah. But she doesn't simply repeat herself. She sort of with the magic of it is that she
00:58:00
Speaker
She says it one way and then she says it another way, which you'd think couldn't be the same way, but then somehow it is. Like grit caught on a wheel, like shining freight.
00:58:15
Speaker
Yeah. That last phrase of this poem is just kind of magical for me right now. And maybe there's something kind of self-descriptive about it too. The way we've learned to talk about simile is as having tenor and vehicle. The shining freight is like the tenor being carried by the vehicle of the simile. Yeah, it's true.
00:58:46
Speaker
Well, there's also this wonderful sounds in those last two lines talk about them, please The black field like grit caught on a wheel long ease Like shining freight the F from field coming back into freight Grit and freight is another internal rhyme So there's it's very thick in the sounds of it. I
00:59:14
Speaker
Ellen, you were saying earlier that Louise was not someone who would abide conventionality in poetry, or maybe in other parts of life, but we were talking about poetry.
00:59:28
Speaker
I wouldn't think of her as a, and she's not a poet who was writing in sort of traditional meters or rhyme schemes or that kind of thing. I think it might be useful for our listeners to hear you say a word about this moment, relative to this moment that you've just identified for us.
00:59:53
Speaker
Some listeners might be under a misapprehension that on the one hand there's formal poetry that's old-fashioned, that has rhyme and meter and so on, and then on the other hand there's free verse which just does whatever it wants to do.
01:00:12
Speaker
That seems obviously to—I mean, in your laughter, I think you get the point I'm asking you in a way to elucidate. Free verse isn't really free, is it? But it's finding its own form? Well, the question is free to do what? Yeah. You have to say free to do what? Yeah.
01:00:34
Speaker
It's not really free from or free to do something. I think it was, wasn't it Benjamin Franklin who said that? Right. Something about, you gotta say, when you talk about freedom, is it freedom from or is it freedom for? Right. So one of the things about free verse is that you have an opportunity
01:00:59
Speaker
to see how you can play with the different elements. You already made reference to the elements of the relationship between
01:01:10
Speaker
the line, the rhythm of the line, the rhythm of the syntax, where is that going to play out in the poem? How do you want that to play out in the poem? And here, just looking over the poem, I mean, this is maybe not the time to do it exhaustively, but just at a glance.
01:01:30
Speaker
those first lines sound, I mean, we don't come to a full stop at the end of any of them. There are commas at the end of those first few lines, but they do feel like self-contained sort of syntactical units. I was born in the month of the bull, line break, the month of heaviness, comma, line break, or of the lowered, comma, destructive head, line break, right? Later in the poem, though, there are these really unjammed lines, like it is
01:01:57
Speaker
line break a stadium. Yeah, that's right. Or if the bull lives, line break one controlled act of revenge. Yeah, that's right. So there's a kind of closed, sort of self-enclosed feeling at the beginning and then later as the poem moves on, this kind of unfurling motion that comes into it. Yes.
01:02:25
Speaker
and you know we can think of
01:02:32
Speaker
We can think of the relation between meter and free verse, just as you were saying, as as it pertains to a poem. But we might also think of it as it relates to the terms of a life. You know, you can live a life according to some scheme that has been set that you then interestingly fulfill or don't or whatever, or you can make it up as you go. Yeah, that's right. But you have form anyway. Sure.
01:03:02
Speaker
And you've given us the picture of, well, if nothing else, of a beautifully formed poem and of a beautifully formed life. And I wish there were more poems, and I wish more than anything there were more life.
01:03:23
Speaker
I'm really grateful to you, Ellen, for sitting with me this last hour and talking about your friend and talking about this poem. And I just want to thank you for that. And I want to offer my most sincere condolences to you for your loss.
Tribute through 'Brooding Likeness'
01:03:41
Speaker
Thank you. Well, thank you for including me in your podcast about her.
01:03:48
Speaker
Might I ask you, I mean, we've heard the poem more than once, but I want to hear it once without interruption in your voice. Would you be willing to read it as a way to say goodbye? Thank you. Rooting likeness. I was born in the month of the bull, the month of heaviness, or of the Lord, the destructive head, or of purposeful blindness.
01:04:16
Speaker
So I know, beyond the shadowed patch of grass, the stubborn one, the one who doesn't look up, still senses the rejected world. It is a stadium, a well of dust. And you who watch him, looking down in the face of death, what do you know of commitment? If the bull lives
01:04:45
Speaker
one controlled act of revenge be satisfied that in the sky like you he is always moving not of his own accord but through the black field like grit caught on a wheel like shining freight
01:05:08
Speaker
Well, Alan Bryant Voigt, thank you again for this conversation. Thank you for that beautiful reading of the poem. Thank you for spending the time and giving us your words. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you listeners for listening along. Be well, everyone, and stay tuned for more.