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Elisa Gonzalez on Louise Glück ("A Village Life")
2.4k Plays1 year ago
After a little hiatus, the podcast returns with a cluster of new episodes on the great, late poet Louise Glück, recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Louise passed away on October 13.
First up we have the brilliant poet and writer Elisa Gonzalez, who knew Louise as both teacher and friend. Elisa has chosen the poem "A Village Life" for our conversation.
Elisa's first collection of poems, Grand Tour, was just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. About the book, Louise Glück wrote, "These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written." You can find Elisa's poems, essays, and stories in places like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Point, The Drift, and The New York Times Magazine. Follow Elisa on Twitter.
You can find Elisa's memorial piece for Louise here, in The Paris Review.
The other conversations in this cluster will roll out over the course of this week—make sure you're following the podcast to get them as soon as they come out.
Please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get occasional newsletters to update you on the podcast and my other work.
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Transcript
Return of the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's been a while since we've had a new episode of this podcast. I've sort of been on hiatus, tending to my life and to other parts of my career and work.
00:00:22
Speaker
But I was saying to our guest today, who is Lisa Gonzalez, about whom I'll say more in just a moment, I was saying to her before we started recording how much I've been missing having these conversations. And so I'm glad to get back into it today and we have a whole bunch of episodes in the works and that will start rolling out very shortly.
New Format Focus on Poetry News
00:00:52
Speaker
This particular episode and a couple others I think that will come out soon are a bit different from the past practice of the podcast. In the usual order of things, I invite a guest on, someone I know that I want to talk to, and then I let them
00:01:09
Speaker
choose whatever poem they want. And that's what we talk about in a kind of one-off way, though inevitably connections start forming between the episodes. That's been interesting. But yeah, that's been the procedure that we followed. Well, this is different in part because, you know, there was news in the poetry world and it felt like big news recently and sad news.
00:01:35
Speaker
The
Impact of Louise Glick's Passing
00:01:36
Speaker
poet Louise Glick, who I think by any kind of accounting is one of the major figures in American poetry, in Anglophone poetry and world poetry of the last several decades, very sadly passed away.
00:02:01
Speaker
And that news came as a big blow to many of the people, well, to the poetry world, to many of my friends who felt in various ways very close to Louise, came as a great blow to them. And the thought occurred to me that one thing that we could do here with the podcast
00:02:38
Speaker
beautiful flowering of reminiscences, memories, essays that people have been writing and sort of publicly grieving Louise's passing, sharing their accounts of the person they knew and the poet they knew. One thing we could add to that maybe is an opportunity using the format of the podcast to single out a few poems of hers.
00:02:54
Speaker
that might add to the already
00:03:07
Speaker
in a few episodes that I'll be doing, this being the first, and sit with the poem for the hour. I think inevitably a conversation about a single poem, particularly with scholars and critics, writers, poets who knew Louise personally, a conversation about any poem will lead to other kinds of talk, to talk about her life and about relationships and about
00:03:37
Speaker
the poetry business maybe even, and the way lives intersect with each other and with the culture. But I thought it would be nice to have individual poems as the kind of touchstone that we kept returning to.
00:03:54
Speaker
Today is the first of those conversations. I'm still trying to finalize some details about who else I will be talking to, but there will be a couple, at least one or two other episodes on Louise that will come out shortly.
Discussion on 'A Village Life'
00:04:10
Speaker
I did do the thing that I normally do, which is to invite the guest to choose the poem. And Elisa has chosen the poem, A Village Life, so the title poem from the book, A Village Life. For us to talk about today, we will get to hear Louise Glick reading it on recording in a moment.
00:04:33
Speaker
But first, let me tell you a little bit more about our guest. Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, an essayist, and a fiction writer. That's the newest of her identities to me, but I'm very excited about it. Her first book, which is a book of poems called Grand Tour, was just published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux this year in 2023, I think just a month ago maybe.
00:05:01
Speaker
And I thought that I could say things about this book, but then a better thought occurred to me, which was to quote Louise Glick on Elisa Gonzalez. Louise, as we will talk about, was one of Elise's mentors, and she has written these words that appear on the back of Grand Tour. So this is Louise Glick on our guest today. Quote, a mesmerizing book
00:05:31
Speaker
deeply original, one of the most profound reading experiences I've had in years. There is, in Elisa Gonzalez's Nature of Something Volcanic, a sense of fire originating at a very great depth, so when it breaks the surface it breaks blazing. Here are wild elegies to lost selves, here too poems of eerie delicacy and strangeness, radiating a kind of desperate sadness.
00:05:58
Speaker
But I love best the long, incautious poems. Here one feels most urgently her extraordinary force, her dignity, her savage hunger, her sweetness. These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written.
00:06:18
Speaker
Well, that is an extraordinary thing, I think, to have said about one's work. So I hope I haven't embarrassed Elisa too much. Let me say also that her debut novel, The Awakenings, and her nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth, are also going to come out with FSG. You can find
00:06:40
Speaker
Elise's essays and poems in such places and stories in such places as Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker.
00:06:54
Speaker
Elisa's someone who I'm very grateful to count as a friend of mine, and I'm very happy to have her in conversation with us all today, though I'm, of course, quite sad that the occasion that brings us together today is such a desperately sad one.
Revisiting Glick's Poems
00:07:20
Speaker
Elisa, how are you feeling today? How's it going?
00:07:25
Speaker
Well, I'm doing well. It is a sad occasion, but I am glad to be talking about this poem and about Louise and her poetry with you. I think that finding
00:07:43
Speaker
or returning to the poems has been one thing that I've been doing a lot of since Louis' staff and it is both sad and comforting at the same time. Good. Yeah, I mean, I've been doing it too. I feel as though, and I should say at the outset that
00:08:12
Speaker
Louise Glick is someone that I've been in the same room as a couple of times at Poetry Readings. I've heard her read. She's not someone I ever met, and I regret that deeply, but I'm really happy to have you here with us today.
00:08:34
Speaker
And I wonder just before we get to the poem, Elisa, if you'd be willing to share a little bit of memory for us about how it was that you first met Louise Glick, maybe what it was like a little bit to be her student, and some view perhaps even of the shape that that relationship took over the years since you were her student.
00:09:01
Speaker
Yeah. I first met Louise over the phone, and it was an inauspicious meeting. I definitely would not have thought that she would go on to be one of the most important people in my life for many years. I was 18 and had been admitted to Yale and had submitted some homes with my application.
00:09:29
Speaker
and Yale had called Louise. I mean, all of this happened without my knowing, but they had sent her the poems and asked her to call me and talk to me about Yale. And so I was at a gas station in Ohio and I picked up an unknown- It's a very poetic place, right?
00:09:56
Speaker
very poetic. And Lancaster is truly one of the most depressing towns. Sorry, the Lancaster. And I was actually with my boyfriend at the time and picked up the phone and heard her kind of spidery rasp saying, you know, asking if
00:10:21
Speaker
It was me saying Louise Glick and I locked him out of the car to have the conversation, but I was so terribly awkward. So you were sitting in the car. This is on your cell phone. I was on my cell phone. I was sitting in the car.
00:10:37
Speaker
We had this painfully stilted conversation that both of us left thinking, oh, well, that was a terrible failure. But I still applied, I did go to Yale, I still applied to be in her workshop in my first semester of freshman year, but I desperately hoped that she would have forgotten who I was by that point. But she had not, and later on,
00:11:01
Speaker
She told me like I thought that that was a terrible like I thought you hated me I thought you were never gonna come to Yale. I never thought I would talk to you again and I I wonder what it was in in that you were feeling that produced that effect that she received in that way I mean there must I mean beyond just awkwardness or embarrassment. I mean you were 18. Let's be fair You know and this famous poet is calling you know what I mean though like right? No, I wonder if there was some kind of resistance or I don't know
00:11:32
Speaker
I don't know. Well, I actually think that both ways, and I think we're not in many ways very similar at all in terms of personality, but I think that when we're feeling shy or uncomfortable could come off as kind of aloof or like... I see.
00:11:49
Speaker
almost disdainful, perhaps, rather than the self-consciousness gets turned toward a rejection of the other person. This I have only thought about much later. But Louis and I had discussed this, and this was part of the kind of lore of how we knew each other.
00:12:11
Speaker
between us. But I saw her, I last saw her at the end of August in Vermont, and for some reason we were talking about this again. And she said,
00:12:26
Speaker
I've always pictured this as there being some risk of you being left or under threat that it was your boyfriend's car and he was mad at you and there was this
00:12:45
Speaker
and i was like no i was driving like it was there was no risk to me i mean he was annoyed but it was it was just she had made the situation more dramatic than it was and and also and i and kind of a better story that there was like this other
00:13:01
Speaker
interpersonal problem that was also happening that maybe had bigger consequences in my life. And that seemed to me very emblematic of her kind of imagination where she had taken a story and then she had put another story in there to complicate it and to make it deeper.
00:13:22
Speaker
to dramatize it, to sort of create characters that would externalize internal psychological states, maybe, or feelings. I mean, it's something we see happening in our poems, I guess.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I do think she had a very dramatic in that sense of theatrical or like stage quality, almost like a fictional or perhaps a novelistic imagination that there are characters and a lot of times they're doing things in the poems, but
00:13:53
Speaker
Um, that was funny. And, you know, I, as her student, I think many people have talked about what it's like to be in a workshop with her. And I truly did find it to be, um, well, at first, like absolutely terrifying. Um, but.
Glick's Feedback Style
00:14:09
Speaker
in a very invigorating way. I have never known someone to like care more about a poem, which I think is why sometimes people find her harsh. I mean, including me, but it's, but it's the, everything was so much in service of the poem. But I remember she would often solicit comments, but she wouldn't, she would withhold her own kind of judgment until
00:14:36
Speaker
basically the end of the discussion. And I remember the first time that she
00:14:42
Speaker
kind of delivered this oration that seemed to be, I mean, clearly she had thought about whatever it was, but it really was like a kind of, the way I remember it was a sort of magnificent speech about the poem and kind of about poetry. And I thought, you know, this is the most brilliant person that I've ever seen. How does anyone's mind work like this? And then I think from then on I was like, I,
00:15:11
Speaker
we'll have to figure out how to learn from you, even if it's painful for my ego. Well, so you've anticipated my question with that last remark. I mean, that kind of attention must be a really kind of wondrous thing to behold and easier when it's someone else's poem she's talking about.
00:15:32
Speaker
And when it's your poem, it feels, you feel exposed or seen through or embarrassed. Yeah, her seeing was very intense. I felt that she, in many ways, I mean, I did cry the first time that I got her comments back on a poem. Partly because it was a bad poem and she was just kind of like, there's no, there's no salvaging.
00:16:02
Speaker
She literally wrote hopelessly conventional on it, and I was completely devastated. And clearly she liked you a whole lot, even from the beginning, or I don't think she would have gotten gone to the lengths she did, but what's emerging is she liked you enough to tell you the truth or something, or she loved poetry enough to not be able to lie about it.
00:16:32
Speaker
I think both of those things are true and you know one thing that I have thought that I will miss greatly is that I have many friends who are poets and I trust their voices but she is certainly perhaps the person that I
00:16:58
Speaker
just felt, I didn't necessarily, especially as I got older and became more confident and
00:17:08
Speaker
in my own poetry I could disagree with her but I knew that she would always tell me what she thought and that sometimes that and perhaps quite often that would be fairly or could be pretty devastating to the poem if my sort of ability to bear the harsh judgments you know increased over the years but
00:17:35
Speaker
That feels like a real absence there and I had I looked Recently, you know as you because when someone dies often you go through the detritus looking for remnants of them as you know and I Found
00:18:00
Speaker
a comment that she wrote to me on a poem from that first semester. And it was a poem that she really liked that she had
00:18:14
Speaker
It was embarrassing, but I think of it as the first real poem I ever wrote. It was the first poem that ever felt out of my control while I was writing it, and it was one that she really liked and told everyone in the class that she thought it was marvelous.
00:18:31
Speaker
And that was great, but also pretty embarrassing. But when I looked at the comments, they were still extremely critical. There were many expressions of admiration, and overall it was admiring.
00:18:49
Speaker
point she was like, not on the whole a disaster, as my friend says, but you know, it has these problems of lineation. And like, I think your instinct here is right, but it needs to go this way or whatever. And I was, this is a, you know, this is a kind of crazy level of dedication to be giving to an 18 year old's poem. Like, just, you know, it's, it's the level of dedication that I feel she gave to her own work too. But
00:19:19
Speaker
But then you see it, she had so many students and she was doing this for all of these things. Her commitment to poetry was extraordinary. I mean, it's I guess an overused word these days, but it's a real kind of generosity that you're describing in her attention.
00:19:49
Speaker
And it seems both to be born of a thoroughly authentic kind of feeling of attachment to the art, but also to the people who were entering into her care and classroom.
00:20:13
Speaker
It's a really beautiful kind of story you're telling about what it was like to be in that classroom and to be her student, not just in the classroom, but out of it as well. And then over the years, Elisa, you and she remained in touch, is that right?
Evolving Friendship with Glick
00:20:30
Speaker
And would see each other sometimes.
00:20:33
Speaker
And I guess over that span, a pretty major event happened. I mean, more than one, I'm sure, but one that was highly public event happened in her life, which is she won the Nobel Prize.
00:20:45
Speaker
I don't know, just briefly maybe, what was it like, I'm not asking for, you know, to dish about that particular event, but just what was it like having graduated from college and, you know, moving on into your own adult life to maintain a friendship with a kind of former teacher? And did it feel like things were changing? Or did it feel like you were forever her student? How did that sort of sit with you?
00:21:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. It's a good question because I think that sort of like, you know, I was thinking about the strangeness of the word mentor, you know, and where it comes from. It's so like martial and and there's something about that. I don't know if we
00:21:40
Speaker
have kind of adequately like scoped out what it means to lose someone who was your teacher and your friend and like demi parental at some times and other times very much not. I think Louise's
00:21:58
Speaker
the intensity of her seeing me and her what I always felt as like great kindness to me in so many areas of my life like the generosity that you're talking about with my work and but other things interpersonally
00:22:15
Speaker
I felt that she was a person that I could always turn to, but certainly I had to become less intimidated by her over time. It took, I think, some years for us to develop what I thought of as kind of an actual friendship where I would say, oh, we are friends. I mean, she would always ask me when I went to see her,
00:22:42
Speaker
to bring poems, you know, if I had them. So we would go through the ritual that I had been doing for so many years, you know, by the last by the last time I did that, where I would pass printed pieces of paper across the table to her and she would read them and I would try not to look at her face while she read them. And then she didn't write hopelessly conventional on any of that.
00:23:08
Speaker
No, but, you know, she would make faces and cross out lots of things and all sorts of... I never got that again, but, you know, I got a lot of other... Well, it's interesting that she, you know, even in that blurb I read, it's the incautious Elisa that she most admired. Yes. Would she ever share her work in progress with you or new things with you before they were published? No.
00:23:32
Speaker
Sometimes before they were, but not like drafts. She would talk about her creative, I think she was in my experience of her pretty protective about work until she felt that there were things that could be threatened or that things necessarily needed time in order to develop.
00:24:00
Speaker
It's interesting because it's there already in a way in the classroom version of her you're giving us, which is the sort of withholding of her own perspective until she's ready to present it as this kind of fully formed thing.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, she also she did have these periods where she wasn't writing, you know, and she's written about that and talked about the silences quite a bit. And I had my own silences for part of the time that I, you know, knew her and we would talk about that. But I think that made or my sense was that that made the process of creation for her feel pretty fraught and therefore something that really needed to be
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah, protected while it was happening, which involved some retreat from the world, perhaps. Sure. That makes a lot of sense. I know that she did show things to other people, but I felt that sometimes I could, if I knew she was writing, I could also kind of see some of the things she was thinking about and what she was telling me.
Influence on Writing Style
00:25:05
Speaker
Not that it was always like the same advice, but she was working on a village life when I became her student.
00:25:13
Speaker
I remember her counseling me to write longer lines, to write longer poems, to risk being prosaic, to like not prize for the kind of lyric perfection of a line. And all of that is stuff that she was herself working through, I think, as she was writing A Village Life. And when the book came out, I was like,
00:25:37
Speaker
Oh, I do see that. Why didn't you just tell me to do this? Yeah. When she started writing prose poems, she told me to start writing prose poems. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I do think that I don't want to make it sound like her advice was so just taking what she was thinking about and applying it to her students. I don't think she was doing that at all. But I think when there are certain things on your mind or when you're working
00:26:07
Speaker
stuff out. Those are coming out in other ways. Listen, teachers are people too. Well, you would know. I guess so. Stars, they're just like us. All right, Elisa, this has been a really lovely conversation about the woman and teacher and friend whom you knew. I think it's probably high time that we listen to the poem. So
00:26:36
Speaker
We have this recording in the recording, which I hope will come out at a respectable volume, but just if you need to do your listener, you'll hear her say a couple of prefatory things about the poem and then read the poem. So we will listen to the recording. You should know that there is as ever a link in the episode notes that will take you to a text of the poem. So if you'd like to read along as you listen, please do.
00:27:06
Speaker
Without further ado, here is Louise Glick reading A Village Life. And this is the title poem of that book, which was also the first poem written. And it was the first poem I had written in a very, very, very long time. And all poems have their triggers.
00:27:35
Speaker
especially if you have been long silent. I was reading a book by John Berger, the novelist, and I came on the word escarpment, and I remembered, I used to use that word. I used to know what it applied to, and I looked it up and I read about it, and I thought, that's my book.
00:28:04
Speaker
as I can write a book about that word. And that was my experience that I wrote a book about that word. So this is called A Village Life. And the speaker here is, in fact, a speaker who's appeared before. The mountain figures in many of these poems.
00:28:30
Speaker
The neighbor is also in several. A village life. The death and uncertainty that await me as they await all men. The shadows evaluating me because it can take time to destroy a human being. The element of suspense needs to be preserved.
00:28:59
Speaker
On Sundays, I walk my neighbor's dog so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother. The dog waits for me in the doorway. Summer and winter, we walk the same road. Early morning at the base of the escarpment. Sometimes the dog gets away from me. For a moment or two, I can't see him behind some trees.
00:29:29
Speaker
He's very proud of this, this trick he brings out occasionally and gives up again as a favor to me. Afterward, I go back to my house to gather firewood. I keep in my mind images from each walk, Menard growing by the roadside. In early spring, the dog chasing the little gray mice
00:30:00
Speaker
So for a while it seems possible not to think of the hold of the body weakening, the ratio of the body to the void shifting, and the prayers becoming prayers for the dead. Midday, the church bells finished. Light in excess, still fog blankets the meadow.
00:30:27
Speaker
So you can't see the mountain in the distance covered with snow and ice. When it appears again, my neighbor thinks her prayers are answered. So much light, she can't control her happiness. It has to burst out in language. Hello, she yells, as though that is her best translation.
00:30:56
Speaker
She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain, though in one case the fog never lifts. But each person stores his hope in a different place. I make my soup. I pour my glass of wine. I'm tense like a child approaching adolescence.
00:31:23
Speaker
Soon it will be decided for certain what you are. One thing, a boy or girl. Not both any longer. And the child thinks, I want to have a say in what happens. But the child has no say whatsoever. When I was a child, I did not foresee this.
00:31:52
Speaker
Later the sun sets, the shadows gather rustling the low bushes like animals just awake for the night. Inside there's only firelight. It fades slowly. Now only the heaviest woods still flickering across the shelves of instruments. I hear music coming from them sometimes.
00:32:22
Speaker
even locked in their cases. When I was a bird, I believed I would be a man. That's the flute. And the horn answers, when I was a man, I cried out to be a bird. And the music vanishes. And the secret it confides in me vanishes also.
00:32:51
Speaker
in the window, the moon is hanging over the earth, meaningless but full of messages. It's dead. It's always been dead. But it pretends to be something else, burning like a star and convincingly so that you feel sometimes it could actually make something grow on earth.
00:33:17
Speaker
If there's an image of the soul, I think that's what it is. I move through the dark as though it were natural to me, as though I were already a factor in it. Tranquil and still the day dawns. On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.
00:33:47
Speaker
So that's Louise Glick reading A Village Life. Elisa, well, obviously we will get to all kinds of moments in the poem, particular lines and images and movements that stand out to you and that you want to talk about, but
00:34:08
Speaker
I wonder if you might just share with us as a place to start what you notice in her voice and what it's like to listen to Louise Glick read her poetry, what it was like for you just now to listen to her voice in performance of this poem.
Glick's Humor and Mysticism
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's really, you know, recording an amazing technology. It's like hearing her talk again. She was just very.
00:34:44
Speaker
funny. And you can hear her mysticism in that I felt like she was such a skeptic and such a mystic in that little story about the word escarpment. She was- Say more about that mysticism and skepticism in that particular story. It's like, you know, coming across this word, that's like honestly a pretty ugly word. Yeah, for sure.
00:35:13
Speaker
and then being fixed on it and then going to look like there's like bibliomantically at the dictionary and then thinking my book is in that and that's that unlocks everything and that's I feel that that sort of bizarre mystic journey is one that Louise um I mean I think it is in the poems but it is also in you know her kind of life but she's also you know just
00:35:40
Speaker
could be so poorly rational and was not necessarily, I think someone
00:35:51
Speaker
You know, she's dry and ironic, too. And you can also hear that in the poem. And you can hear that in her delivery. I do think that I'm not sure she thought she was a good reader of poems. I know that she didn't really like doing it. But I have always thought that she reads her own poems well in the sense that there's a kind of
00:36:14
Speaker
often humor that I think can be missed on the page if you're not attending to it already. Or if that kind of thing isn't funny to you. Humor is so personalized, right? But in her voice, I think you can hear the lines that are landing with more
00:36:37
Speaker
of a wry wink, perhaps, as well as the ones that are delivered much more seriously and confidently. If there's an image of the soul, I think that's what it is. It's crazy to me to imagine writing that line, and it's funny to hear it also delivered so boldly, which is that she was also very bold there.
00:37:02
Speaker
And her poetry more generally has these lines in it, these sort of frequently quoted lines that are often abstracted from the poems, but that sound like the pronouncements that you might expect the Nobel Prize winning poet to have had.
00:37:17
Speaker
at the end of my suffering, et cetera, those kinds of moments, right? Yeah. But at the same time, I do think, I'm not saying she couldn't make the grand statements, but I do always think in context, there's often some mitigating or qualifying factor to that grandiosity. At the end of my suffering, there was a door. It is also quite literally about a flower in a sort of
00:37:47
Speaker
like the image is working on multiple levels there as it emerges from the earth. And you know here I do think one thing that's very beautiful about this particular one is the hypothetical of if there's an image of the soul I think that's what it is. Like there's a lot of uncertainty built into something that is at the same time.
00:38:13
Speaker
a wildly bold pronouncement. And so that's part of the skepticism you were hearing when you say skepticism and mysticism. Right. Well, of course, but yeah, go on, please. Oh, no. And I think I'm one of the reasons that I love this poem is how it has this kind of almost staggering movement.
Prosaic Elements in Glick's Poetry
00:38:33
Speaker
I mean, it's quite calm, I think. But the way that it moves back and forth between these
00:38:39
Speaker
pretty mundane scenes and then this hovering of the death and uncertainty that await me as they await them. All men.
00:38:54
Speaker
I mean the fact that those lines, the opening lines of the poem are in such close proximity with lines like, on Sundays I walk my neighbor's dog so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother, which taken out of the context of this poem and take away the line break or something, which of course you can't do, but if you could, nobody would recognize those lines as poetry at all, right? Yeah. And there's also the fact that
00:39:24
Speaker
If you were looking at the poem, you can see that first stanza of the death and uncertainty that await me as they await all men, the shadows evaluating me, et cetera. It breaks off in a dash and then it goes to the line that, the two lines you're talking about on set as I walk my neighbor's dog. So there's even that sort of breaking in of the kind of prosaic that I think is like
00:39:47
Speaker
I mean it not only repeatedly happens in the problem that something kind of breaks with a dash or there's an almost an incomplete thought or story but it feels.
00:40:01
Speaker
almost like a journal to me when I like look at it on the page that there's something about the alternation of thought and fancy and the serious and then also the recording of the images from the walk and the sense that both that we're getting something that's very much anchored in little moments and also it seems like a great quantity of time is passing because we have the neighbor's sick mother who
00:40:31
Speaker
you know, these walks are happening repeatedly over the course of seasons. There's a kind of habitual kind of temporality to this. It's like the famous first line of Proust or something, Long Tong. It's like the On Sundays suggests
00:40:49
Speaker
yeah it's different from this sunday i walked or you know um that's right that's interesting i want to go back to a word you used um earlier because i thought it was such an interesting one and it and it suddenly occurred to me that i had never thought of how different tonally the two senses of the same word are when you said it has the poem has it appeals to you because it has a kind of
00:41:14
Speaker
How did you put it? Staggered or staggering? Oh yeah, but I meant, yeah. Well, you know, so you already, because you know me and you get it, are anticipating the point that I'm making. Let me just make it for the audience, which is like... Sorry. No, no. I mean, it's like, we can say like, oh, that was staggering. What we mean by that is that it was like...
00:41:35
Speaker
overwhelming and that it sort of has knocked us back onto our butts or whatever, like it's knocked us out. But you were referring to a more kind of
00:41:49
Speaker
like its structure is staggered in some sense, right? Or were you saying both things or I don't know. Well, I was thinking of the second one, but I do think this poem is staggering in both senses. And also I think there's a kind of, part of what I meant is I had the image of like a staggering walk, like someone who's walking kind of unevenly because I think
00:42:14
Speaker
with the movement and the none of these stanzas it like it's not regularized in terms of stanza length or most of the lines are fairly long like almost filling the page none of them are going beyond that and needing to be indented and there are some shorter lines too but it has a kind of unevenness in texture that I find very interesting and I think is definitely a
00:42:42
Speaker
know, represents a departure from at least the sort of classic Louise Glick of some of the earlier books. Which would have been a shorter line and a more uniform kind of line. Yeah, I think that's the standard thing.
00:42:59
Speaker
And also a shorter poem. I mean, this poem is, you know, two and a half pages in my book, and it has many movements. And I think it is it is risking both being prosaic, you know, in the sense of just literally like possible. I mean, I think some reviewers did say this, you know, like, where is the poetry or something. But also,
00:43:24
Speaker
it risks losing the reader with these movements and with that sense that I think you could have that you don't quite know where it's going or what it is trying to tell you. And there is this kind of following along that has to happen, but... Because it's sort of stochastic. I mean, quite literally, it's like the random walk kind of thing, right? Yes. Where each step sort of narrows
00:43:52
Speaker
But as though sort of haphazardly or in a kind of highly contingent way, the
00:43:57
Speaker
the possibilities that are then possible and way leads on to way as Frost put it in that famous poem. But I like also here there's walking but there's walking with the dog and the dog isn't even her dog and the dog sometimes gets, sorry, I shouldn't say her, I should say his, the speakers or the speakers, right? I wanna come back to that actually.
00:44:24
Speaker
distinction in a moment. But the dog waits for me in the doorway. Sometimes the dog gets away from me. So there's a sense of being that's both sort of represented in the poem, but if I'm hearing you right, Elisa, also fair is a description of the poem that it feels sort of not totally in control of its own procedure or motion, and there's something kind of random or out of control about it.
00:44:48
Speaker
Yeah, I like your turning to the dog there because there's a sort of push and pull that is happening, I think, between what maybe we could say were the two kind of major elements of the poem between the meditation on death and the soul and what happens, you know, the void that awaits us and the
00:45:13
Speaker
everyday details of this life that is happening in the village. I think we sort of, I don't want to skip ahead too much, but I think we sort of end with both of those together, right?
00:45:29
Speaker
Both of which together? Both of the two aspects of the poem coming together, I moved through the dark as though it were natural to me, as though I were already a factor in it, you know, projecting into a death that hasn't happened. But then tranquil and still the day dawns on market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.
00:45:50
Speaker
and that's all one stands as, so there is a kind of unification there. I like that. So these two strands that can feel where the distance between them can feel pretty wide are maybe sort of making their way towards each other and as the poem goes on. So I have a question that is,
00:46:11
Speaker
of a global observation about the poem, which is that, and I don't know, I mean, I don't know Louise Glick's work nearly as well as you do, but it strikes me that the thing I'm about to say is the kind of thing one could say different as this poem might be in certain other formal ways about a great many of her poems that the
00:46:30
Speaker
First-person pronoun is all over it, right?
Use of First-Person Pronoun
00:46:34
Speaker
The word I appears again and again in this poem. Does it feel fair to say that? I mean, obviously she's not alone in this. This is a sort of constituent element of what we have come to think of as lyric poetry and the way it operates.
00:46:53
Speaker
But, you know, it's also become a kind of reflexive thing in talking about poetry, increasingly so for reasons that are, you know, maybe interesting, but too much of a digression to get into here to say,
00:47:08
Speaker
that the eye is a speaker, that the poem has a speaker. We heard in the prefatory comments that she made before reading this poem that she herself used that language, that the poem's speaker is, I forget exactly what she said about it, maybe you could remind us. So I guess I just wonder about
00:47:28
Speaker
how you, both as a general matter, but then maybe more to the point, like in this poem, are observing the kind of force or effect of that repeated I that is also seems very much, so on the one hand, that would seem to suggest a kind of, that the sort of domain of the poem is the sort of,
00:47:55
Speaker
parameters of the consciousness of the poet or something. But then on the other hand, the eye feels very much like a character in a setting that's not dramatic in the wow,
00:48:14
Speaker
so many dramatic things are happening there, but dramatic as though it's a kind of setting. I don't know how else to put it in the literary sense. And I even think about it with respect to her voice that you're not going to mistake
00:48:31
Speaker
Louise Glick always sounds like Louise Glick when she reads her poems, to me anyway. And yet the speakers whose position she's articulating change quite dramatically in many cases. So I'm asking you to sort of think about how that works for you here or what sort of version of that you see operating here. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm glad you brought that up because I think one of the things that's very interesting about her work is how often she
00:49:01
Speaker
as a poet chooses to occupy different persona and voices in across many books that I think of as pretty distinct. And I mean, sometimes like much more explicitly, like in a verno or meadowlands, but in a village life and faithful and virtuous night, for instance, and also winter recipes for the collective we get.
00:49:27
Speaker
at least Faithful and Virtuous Night and A Village Life both have kind of repeated speakers who are not necessarily, who are not mythic figures or flowers, but are just kind of inventions that are taking that speak for across multiple poems. But yeah, Louise Glick does always sound like Louise Glick in some sense. And I do think that
00:49:55
Speaker
But I think that there is, to me it seems at least in this poem that there's an element of choosing voices that allow the poet, allow her kind of overarching mind and preoccupations to get closer to something than she could speaking from perhaps more
00:50:21
Speaker
stable lyric eye position or more directly about life that I think the setting, as you say, this does feel fictional or maybe novelistic, perhaps one could say, in that the setting and the characters are operating importantly in the poem. I mean, they're not
00:50:46
Speaker
this there might be elements that are drawn from life but I feel like part of the reason that
00:50:52
Speaker
there is a distinct other voice here is to allow different things to come to the surface, perhaps. And I think it's interesting that even within this speaker who is not her, but is also her, we also have the neighbor talking and the ventriloquism of the imagined voices of the musical instruments who are, that part is so strange to me and I love it so much.
00:51:23
Speaker
Especially because when it appears, like, when I was a bird, I believed I would be a man. And then line break, that's the flute. So you're totally unanchored at first. It's like, what is happening here? And I think those moments of confusion or destabilization are productive in the poem. I mean, they're moving you forward and creating these also these glimmers of mystery, maybe.
00:51:48
Speaker
Totally. I mean, it sounds to me in a way like that's sort of inaugurated even in the title of the poem, A Village Life, which is a conventional and idiomatic enough phrase, but when you think about it, it starts to look strange.
Porous Boundaries of Self
00:52:04
Speaker
We think of a life singular as a kind of individual thing. So what would a village life be? Right?
00:52:13
Speaker
It seems like the boundaries of the self have become somewhat porous at this point, and that potential confusion feels abetted in a way by the substitutions that happen in the poem, walking the stranger's dog. It's not strangers, but neighbors, sorry.
00:52:37
Speaker
and for sure at those musical instrument moments, which I agree really strike me in this poem too. But to the extent, Elisa, that we can sort of describe and imagine who the I is, who is the speaker of this poem, who is perhaps
00:53:04
Speaker
you know, as coherent a character as any one of us is or something. Like what is this I like and what are some lines or moments in the, maybe your first half of the poem or take us anywhere you like that feel to you like important moments that we haven't touched on yet that help you to establish or have a sense
00:53:31
Speaker
of who this character is. And I'm just kind of in a way following your lead, your encouragement and thinking for the moment about this character as though the speaker were a kind of fictional character in the kind of novelistic sense. Yeah, I mean,
00:53:55
Speaker
I do think that it is a character, although I will say that probably some of the things I'm going to say are could be descriptions of Louise. I mean, this is a character who's very preoccupied with death and that and who's very clearly has a lot of interiority. And despite participating, well, I don't think this is
00:54:15
Speaker
is participating in the world, has relationships with the neighbor and with the dog and with the market and with the landscape and such, but does seem to
00:54:33
Speaker
has at least a kind of lonely mind, I think, that there's some tension between the social participation and what's happening on the inside, which doesn't seem to be being expressed like the neighbor talks and says,
00:54:48
Speaker
Hello, she yells as though that is funny to hear her ventriloquist or sort of speak that moment because you can almost feel her trying not to sound like herself. Yeah. And it doesn't quite it doesn't quite work. But yeah, but I love it. And then we and we also have someone, you know, when who is
00:55:15
Speaker
It's that line, I'm tense, like a child approaching adolescence. It does feel like a very taught speaker to me, despite the kind of lengthy lines and some of the more slack moments that we were talking about where there's a more prosaic energy. And it's that, and that invocation of the child and, you know, being a child is
00:55:38
Speaker
interesting to me because the adolescence that's being summoned I think is death. So it's like as someone who's aging and then at the same time is or you know is being invoked anyway I think.
00:55:55
Speaker
Sorry, when you say the adolescence that's being summoned is death, am I understanding you right? I'm tense like a child approaching adolescence. Yeah, I read that present tense tension as being partly the anticipation of the death and uncertainty that await me that appears at the beginning. Which is like adolescence in the sense that
00:56:20
Speaker
Oh, this is interesting. Okay, so I'm sort of connecting it back to right, just like you were to the to that first line, the death and uncertainty that await me. She's fascinating, actually, as they await all men, because part of what she's saying there is that there is like a
00:56:38
Speaker
there is a kind of certainty actually about the uncertainty that awaits, right? And it coincides, I like how it sort of coincides there and actually a thing that I've been meaning to ask you about, partly because the line length is so variable here and because Louise was, as you've disclosed to us, encouraging you to experiment with long lines and that kind of thing at the same time as she was writing this poem and book.
00:57:06
Speaker
There's something about the line ending which can feel like the certainty of death or something like that. And yet the line ending, unless it's the last line of the poem, isn't the ending in a kind of complete sense. But sorry, I've lost track of the point slightly. Let me come back to it. Within the sort of space of this poem,
00:57:34
Speaker
Death is like adolescence insofar as death settles once and for all who you are because you can't keep living past it. And adolescence, in the view of this poem,
00:57:50
Speaker
settles who you are, not with the same kind of extremity, but in a sense that is nonetheless real, which is to say, in the sense of this poem, it settles whether you're a boy or a girl. You can no longer be both, the poem says, right?
00:58:08
Speaker
And there's also the thing about the, and the child thinks I want to have a say in what happens, but the child has no say whatsoever, which is, again, like a kind of futile wish that you could have about death that you, I mean, you want to have a say about.
00:58:24
Speaker
right those you know so many i mean i guess you can kind of but i also think that just to turn back that there's it's interesting to me death and uncertainty that await me i mean because i think that also you know that does tie
00:58:43
Speaker
to me to adolescence in the sense that you know it's coming and if you remember being about to turn 13 or feeling like there's a period where the transformation does feel incipient or has started to happen but is also obviously not complete. And adolescence is a period of kind of continual transformation. So that with the uncertainty is an interesting way I think to think about
00:59:09
Speaker
death or like the void or to imagine it as a space of both finality and like potentially, I don't know, like endless change or at least there's so much that's not known about it. Because you're going to be so radically transformed by it from this side of the threshold,
00:59:32
Speaker
It's utterly uncertain, whereas sort of retrospectively from the position of old age to think back to adolescence is to
00:59:42
Speaker
that was the doorway through which you passed to become the person you now are or something, you know? Yeah. And it does seem, yeah, I think so.
Themes of Transformation and Identity
00:59:51
Speaker
And it does seem that there's, I mean, if we go back to the strange moment with the instruments, the way that the instruments are talking, when I was a bird, I believed I would be a man. That's the flute and the horn answers. When I was a man, I cried out to be a bird. There's some sense of like,
01:00:12
Speaker
what we are is not what we wanted to be, but also our wishes were wrong or mistaken in some sense that is being enacted there that I find really interesting. And the transformations are happening in like,
01:00:33
Speaker
opposite directions and also I want to note just for people who aren't looking at the poem, at that place which is, so the previous stanza ends, I hear music coming from them, sorry, the shelves of instruments. I hear music coming from them sometimes, even locked in their cases. And just as an aside, I mean, that felt to me like a kind of poignant
01:01:04
Speaker
description of some of the kind of paradoxically sort of withholding and expressive features that we've been noting that in Glick's poetry more generally, that in some sense, like you get the sense that she can feel like a musical instrument that's locked in its case, but also the music is escaping the locked case, you know? Yeah.
01:01:32
Speaker
But then so then the stanza that follows it, when I was a bird, I believed I would be a man. That's the flute. So just to take that is that's not the whole stanza, but that's the first line and a half of it. There are no quotation marks, which helps to make it confusing. That's the flute, I guess we want to say is like no longer a quotation, but instead a kind of
01:02:02
Speaker
narrators aside glossing for you the thing you just heard. But the lines are describing these wishes, as you put it, and these wishes that are the wrong wishes, maybe, in some sense, but for transformation. And at the same time, it's at the level of our reading of the poem, something like those transformations are underway.
01:02:26
Speaker
There's a kind of confusion about who's speaking and in what capacity.
01:02:34
Speaker
And then the speaker says, then the music vanishes and the secret it confides in me vanishes also, but it's also whatever that we think we've maybe heard the secret, possibly, which has been recorded on the page, but also maybe we haven't. Maybe there was another thing that was being told, I think, that isn't represented here.
01:02:59
Speaker
And then the next turn is to the moon and then toward that line about the soul that we were talking about. And the moon is hanging over the earth, meaningless but full of messages, which I feel is a very important line in this poem where there's so many messages are being spoken or sent out.
01:03:23
Speaker
And there's also that earlier line as though that is her best translation. I feel like maybe there's also some these attempts that various people have and the speaker has to try to translate some kind of elemental longing or like perception about the universe that still can't
01:03:48
Speaker
It has to burst out in language as an earlier line says, but at the same time, it's a secret that's vanishing as soon as it's spoken.
01:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, I want to I want to actually I'm glad you brought us back to that for a moment. I realize we're sort of skipping back and forth, but I think that's cool. That's that's what we wanted. That's what we want. Somehow, like the poem has wanted us to do that. I'm going to I'm just going to say that because it's a comforting thing to believe. You can blame me, but no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, good. Good. It's all of us.
01:04:25
Speaker
The early moment, which was one moment that if I was hearing it right, maybe even got a bit of a laugh in the room where she was reading it. She believes in the Virgin the way I believe in the mountain, where there is this clear juxtaposition, ironically, being made between the neighbor and the speaker.
01:04:53
Speaker
Elisa, is there something you'd want to say about what the kind of upshot of that distinction is? What do you think it means for the speaker of this poem to believe in the mountain?
01:05:12
Speaker
That's that's one version of the question. And another, I guess we never really paused. I mean, you said very interesting things about the way she described her kind of effecting onto the word escarpment earlier. But I wonder, like, I don't know if if we took that seriously, like, what would it like? Why would like let's for the moment credit that fiction. Why would she think?
01:05:39
Speaker
this is the word I'm writing this book about. So I had to look it up encouraged by her to make sure I knew what it meant. I don't have the definition or in front of me, so I'm not reading it out loud, but what an escarpment is, I think is like,
01:05:55
Speaker
a part of a landscape that marks a cliff face or something that marks a steep, not gradual and slow, but a sudden transition in elevation between one part of the landscape and the other. It's like a wall in a way that gets you, say, from a valley to a plateau.
01:06:20
Speaker
I don't know is there something you know I don't know so this is a question about believing in the mountain but also about what sort of weird power mystical power the word escarpment might have had over Glick and why we should care about that and then I just I don't want to have left that behind before we turn our full attention to the ending of the poem which Shirley will want to do but so do you have thoughts about that?
Symbolism of the Mountain
01:06:44
Speaker
Yeah you know it's um
01:06:48
Speaker
It's funny because I think there is a kind of simplistic way in which like believing the mountain. I do think that this poem is interested in the material world, that there is a sort of like
01:07:04
Speaker
a hope that is being stored, when she says, in the soup, in the wine, in the lettuces, in the mountain, also like all part of the kind of same thing, which is counter perhaps to the void. But it's interesting to push on that, I think a little more and think about what it
01:07:28
Speaker
means to believe in something. And I think that the... Well, we know what it means to believe in the Virgin. Yeah, but then to have that applied in the same way to the mountain.
01:07:40
Speaker
Um, or to relate that, I mean, you know, one thing I was thinking about with escarpment is that it's not traversable, perhaps by like normal, like modes, like the steepness of an escarpment with me meant presumably you couldn't like walk up or down it. You might have to climb in some way where it would be dangerous to approach. And it.
01:08:03
Speaker
there's something about a mountain which is sometimes obscured by fog in this poem that disappears, that you have to maintain a belief in it even when you can't see it. There are times when you can see it, and that is true of the world. So that I do see as the likeness there, but it's also interesting because I think the speaker
01:08:30
Speaker
in this poem is never on the mountain. I mean, the encounters with it are still, there's still remoteness and there's distance and a kind of gap there. So belief is a kind of like relation that we have to things that are in some sense inaccessible to us. Yeah, and also that there's something that emerges from the
01:08:57
Speaker
believing through the inaccessibility that gives some hope. We also understand what it means to store hope in the Virgin, right? Or to believe in God. But it is slightly less clear to me what the mountain then gives. Is it the continued existence of the Earth? Just some sort of stability of it still being there?
01:09:26
Speaker
What about that engenders hope? Because I think often when you look at it is when people look at things like mountains, it's not necessarily particularly reassuring about your own humanity or your own place in the world. It can be like quite a, you can experience the sublime, but you don't necessarily experience comfort. Um, so the sublime is terrifying.
01:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, and the mountain will, it can disappear through the fog, but it also is going to continue after you. So it's an odd form of hope, I think, as it is an odd form of belief. It sits so interestingly next to another line which you've referred to, but that is a line I really love because of it's how sort of
01:10:18
Speaker
masterfully and with such a light touch, it captures the kind of idiomatic resources of English, but I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine. For me, it's the mice in that.
01:10:34
Speaker
that suggest that it's habitual also. That's why it's her soup, or the speaker soup, because the speaker's always doing this, right? And those detail, I don't know, what's the tone of that line for you? How would you describe it? Is it grim or hopeful? I don't know. Maybe that's a silly question. No, I don't.
01:11:06
Speaker
I hear almost amusement in it, I think. Here I am doing the things I do to
01:11:18
Speaker
My dumb little things. Yeah, your dumb little things that everyone has. There's like habit appears, I think, quite a lot in this poem. But there's something about that that's almost like, here are the things that I do to comfort myself about the fact that some fog never lifts the void or whatever. The tension is still there, but here are these things I'm doing. And I do love that.
01:11:47
Speaker
The idioms of English specifically, the my is really important there. One time this Polish man was talking to me and he was like, you Americans, he meant English speakers. He was like, everything's yours, yours, yours. Why can't it just be the, you know, or a or whatever? Why is the possession so important? Well, the line would be quite different if it were, I make some soup, I pour a glass of wine.
01:12:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's just a description of, I think there is that kind of invocation of it. And it suggests to me, I mean, it is, it's a portrait of solitude, I think, in that line, like, it is, it's like, it's not those things are not going to be shared, they are. Yeah, my glass of wine, literally singular, right? Yeah, right.
01:12:34
Speaker
And it feels, I just, I feel so much, you know, as we talked about, there's a lot here that can feel quite fictional, but I just really can visualize this person alone in their house doing, you know,
01:12:49
Speaker
making their suit, pouring their glass of wine and sitting by the firelight and thinking. It feels very evocative of a particular scene, but it's definitely, I feel, a portrait of a person who's alone and feels alone. Yeah.
01:13:10
Speaker
but isn't necessarily, I mean, maybe tense, but it's not, I don't know. Despite all the morbid discussion in this poem, it doesn't mostly feel particularly dark or charged, the charging moves in, which is
01:13:29
Speaker
I know we should turn to the end of the poem, but I did want to talk about something that I think is related to that, which is her language of contingency. There's multiple cases here where she has as though, and that has been something that I've thought about. I'm not sure I'll have great thoughts to share. Can you remind us of a couple of those moments? Yeah. I've loved them since I first read this poem.
01:13:59
Speaker
So, I think that the first one is, hello, she yells as though, one break, that is her best translation. And then toward the... A translation of happiness, right? Yes. Her best translation. Yeah, good.
01:14:20
Speaker
At the end, I moved through the dark as though it were natural to me, as though I were already a factor in it. I think it's the repetition of the as though, which calls attention to the sort of contingency of those lines, but I feel that contingent language is all over this poem.
01:14:44
Speaker
I'm tense like a child approaching adolescence and then if there's an image of the soul, I think that's what it is. The moon that pretends to be something else burning like a star and convincingly so that you feel sometimes it could actually make something grow on earth. You feel sometimes that it could do this. It's so tentative and kind of partial.
01:15:13
Speaker
And even at the beginning- It reminds me of that line from the end of Bishops at the Fish House. It's like what we imagine knowledge to be. Yeah, I think the distancing is so interesting. I suppose keeping the uncertainty at least charged throughout the poem and then
01:15:43
Speaker
But those framings are sometimes, tell me if this sounds right to you, they're sometimes marking the distance or the doubt about making an associative leap from the prosaic life as it's lived to the more abstract thing that it's like that feels
01:16:09
Speaker
Like at best, you can make a sort of probabilistic statement about it or a kind of conjecture about it. But then sometimes also those reframings are marking the distance between, I want to say this, I don't even know if it's true.
01:16:26
Speaker
are marking the distance between life as it feels right now to the memory I have of being a child feels far away and it's something like the similar way, or certainly to death. But then also there is the sense that it's figuration or something. But yeah, I like this idea of contingency or doubt or the
01:16:57
Speaker
humility of those moments. Yeah, there is, I suppose, a kind of humility in it. I think it is marking the distance, but it is also imagining, I suppose, different. It's letting us in on the process of imagining different possibilities, I guess. Oh, that's so good. Yeah.
01:17:27
Speaker
I feel that the speaker who's moving through the dark as though it were natural to me, as though I were already a factor in it. I mean, that is an imagining of death, but it's a comforting one. I mean, those are kind of natural to me as though I were already a factor, like too inextricable for it to be...
01:17:48
Speaker
I mean, it's someone moving around a house at night that they know really well, right? There's also that. And the moment with the neighbor is also, I think, very beautiful. It's pointing to the insufficiency of language, but also kind of imagining that a single word could capture
01:18:14
Speaker
all that happiness, right? Yeah, actually, I mean, I was smiling because there's something not at all humble about, you know, hearing your neighbor's hello and understanding it to be her best translation of
01:18:30
Speaker
being so affected by the light she can't control her happiness, right? You know, like maybe she's just saying hello. In other words, it's a rather immodest kind of act of the imagination at the same time. Yeah, and I mean, right before that, she's saying, when it appears again, it being the light and excess, the fog lifting, my neighbor thinks her prayers are answered, which are
01:18:53
Speaker
presumably her prayers for her mother, her sick mother. So there's, that's a very definite statement about what the neighbor thinks, but we don't know if that's a projection or not. So there's, there is a lot of boldness in this here. I mean, in the same way that I feel a great deal is being risked through the, I don't know, continued projection of, or the articulation of the doubt. And some of it is just,
01:19:23
Speaker
the risk of letting your mind seem perhaps dull or uninsightful or your confidence too much. There's a kind of risk of arrogance by putting all these movements of the actual thought on the page. Yeah. I want to do something right now, which is just to
01:19:52
Speaker
Because we keep sort of like ramping up into it and then backing off again and ramping it back up to and backing off again. I want to read the last lines of the poem, you know, the sort of last movement of the poem out loud and then ask you to notice anything that you feel like you that remains to you to notice about them here and now for the sake of our conversation.
01:20:15
Speaker
Okay, in the window, the moon is hanging over the earth, meaningless but full of messages. It's dead, it's always been dead, but it pretends to be something else, burning like a star and convincingly so that you feel sometimes it could actually make something grow on earth.
01:20:41
Speaker
If there's an image of the soul, I think that's what it is. I move through the dark as though it were natural to me, as though I were already a factor in it. Tranquil and still, the day dawns. On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.
Return to Everyday Life
01:21:08
Speaker
It's a it's a really funny last line, but I don't know what I mean, funny in a very particular way. So, Alisa, what you know, we've had we've been having this conversation about the poem, like in the light of that conversation, what do these last and what do you find yourself thinking about when I read these last several lines out loud?
01:21:28
Speaker
I'm glad you did. It was good to hear your voice and Louisa's voice, different versions of these lines. I was thinking about how complicated that image of the soul is, like that version of the moon that stanza that starts, it's dead, it's always been dead.
01:21:59
Speaker
unfolds this description of the moon so much. And then there's the kind of language that's sort of hedging that we've talked about you so that you feel sometimes it could actually make something grow on earth and then stands a break. One line, if there's an image of the soul, I think that's what it is. And I always think I don't know what that is then. Like, you know, what am I supposed to do? What are we being taught about the soul?
01:22:25
Speaker
Yeah, is it the deadness? Is it like the soul reflects perhaps
01:22:33
Speaker
something? Like what? The world around it? Yeah. So, I mean, it would be one thing to say, well, the soul is like the moon. You might mean anything by that, but she goes on to elaborate like what it is about the moon that is arresting her attention here. And it's, to my reading, it's, yes, it's dead. It's always been dead. So it's like, it's a rock, you know? It's maybe like the mountain in a way. Yeah.
01:22:59
Speaker
But it pretends to be something else, right? So it looks as though it's shining. And we all know that it's like one of those facts that kids learn at some point in school, right? Or from whatever, that the moon's light is reflected light, you know, that it's the sun's light. So it creates the sort of simulation of liveliness.
01:23:24
Speaker
But I don't, you know, if the soul is like that, does that mean the soul's always been dead but it looks alive?
01:23:31
Speaker
And if so, what's the sun that is creating that illumination? You know what I mean? Well, yeah. That, I feel, is really a question. Because if we skip ahead to the lens that we're as though I moved through the dark, as though we're natural to me, as though I were already a factor. And I suppose there's a version of it which is we're far more connected to the void than we think we are. We think we're heading toward death, but we also emerge from something that's
01:23:59
Speaker
completely uncertain and unknown to us or like there's all this there's the sense that perhaps that we're much more a part of the dark than we believe we are but I do think that question of like what
01:24:17
Speaker
reflecting and so that you feel sometimes it could actually make something grow on earth. I do hear and I'm curious whether Louise would kind of make a face of this. I do sort of wonder about like that being about our potential to create things like sometimes as a poet perhaps you feel that you could make something grow here on earth from the you know the light of your own soul or whatever but there is a suggestion that that's both
01:24:45
Speaker
the kind of boldness, the grand claim about what you could do, like you, like a son, but also the doubt about whether in fact that is possible. I mean, because we're just bodies, as you say, there's obviously the time before we exist as people, but then, you know,
01:25:15
Speaker
In that sense, we capture the light for a moment, and then we are revealed to be what we always were, which is like a rock. I should just lay cards on the table here. I've been thinking of the late Wallace Stevens poem, The Rock, which begins, it is an illusion that we were ever alive.
01:25:35
Speaker
lived in the houses of our mothers. Louise loved Stevens. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that that might maybe that's there somewhere here. I'm also hearing at the end of the poem, I'll just do my greatest hits of like modernist, you know, man poets. But Yeats at the end of Adam's Curse, where the moon rises and it's like an empty shell, you know, it's like it's sort of drained of significance. And there's something very kind of poignant about that.
01:26:03
Speaker
But to go to your really brilliant thought, Elisa, which was about perhaps the thing that you thought might make Louise make a face at you, this idea that there might be some light that I wouldn't say comes from, at least in the view of this poem, forget about what you or I think or what she might have thought, but in the view of this poem, it's not really a light that originates
01:26:31
Speaker
in the soul if we're to follow the logic of the metaphor, but it is a light that seems as though it did, right? Because perhaps, because the soul isn't...
01:26:42
Speaker
is so good at reflecting light or something. And it's a light that seems to originate from the soul. And it seems to do so, so convincingly that we are sort of persuaded to think that something could grow in that light, whether that thing be a poem or another person or a plant, I guess. I don't know.
01:27:13
Speaker
I mean, to that extent, I do think that idea, if there is an image of the soul, I think that's what it is, is at least
01:27:26
Speaker
not totally apprehendable, but I feel as though I have a foothold in it and the lines that follow. But what I really want not to let this conversation slip by without hearing you talk about is what to do with the last line of the poem.
01:27:42
Speaker
not just the lettuces, by the way, but like the double market in that feels like a kind of awkwardness in that last line, which I mean, I don't care if it's intentional or not. I don't think that's the interest. I mean, that's the thing people like to say about this. Oh, it must have been intentional. Like, who cares? Really? I don't know. That's the new critic in me saying. But it's interesting. It's, you know, on market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.
01:28:06
Speaker
Well, I do think it is a bit awkward. As someone who sometimes prioritizes awkwardness in her own minds, I admire it. But I do think it is. For the record, that wasn't pejorative. I mean, it's a kind of neutral observation. Descriptively, it is awkward.
01:28:28
Speaker
I feel it's the same kind of line as I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine. It's the kind of thing that you would say, but you probably wouldn't. You would edit out one of those markets probably if you were writing it, but it feels like the way that you might narrate something to yourself. There's something about that market day,
01:28:57
Speaker
to me feel so internal perhaps to a person's way of thinking about like it's not Tuesday or Saturday, it's market day. This is like, again, a life that's full of habitual gestures. It's part of the village life too. Yeah. It's market day in the village.
01:29:16
Speaker
But I do think, yes, so the kind of community habits there. But I think this return to the habit, I don't know, I do read it as moving into the world once again, here we go. And I don't know if that's like an almost an image of kind of
01:29:37
Speaker
the poem could maybe just keep going on forever with this movement between the solitary musings and the social participation that's happening or these images of the world, maybe. But I think it's important that it is like the market, but the person isn't going to buy something or maybe they are trading.
01:30:05
Speaker
um whatever but it's they are taking something they have grown also like right and my lettuces and presumably to sell or whatever um is it being too cute to say that the lettuces are like louise going to market with her poems you know like um i mean these little things she's grown you know i'm 100 sure she would scale at that but i do think that there is some element of i do think that is kind of
01:30:34
Speaker
True i mean i don't i don't know that i like the idea of taking poems to market and also no one pays you very much but i guess lettuces don't cross i don't know lettuces yes but i i do remember her
01:30:51
Speaker
She came to Langdon Hammer's class on, I think it was called poetry since 1950 when I was a student. And she talked about this book and she talked about the word escarpment. But she also talked about the word lettuces and she was really delighted by it.
01:31:12
Speaker
What did she say about it? The sound was this again, I'm going off of many years ago, memory and like some bad notes that I transcribed at some point. But she was really enchanted by the sound of the just the the phrase like I with my lettuces. And she thought the word lettuces was really perfect there. So I also think that maybe intention doesn't matter. But, you know, with the word escarpment, I was also thinking about that.
01:31:41
Speaker
that sometimes
01:31:44
Speaker
poems and poets are guided by sound too, and that there is- By things that are meaningless but full of messages. Yes, and I think the lettuces are that. I think escarpment to me also somewhat sounds like that. I mean, you know, she went and looked it up, but I feel like there's something arresting about the sound and then other things are being pulled from that. Yeah, for sure. And for the record, when I say like, oh, intention, who cares? It's not really, I mean, I don't,
01:32:12
Speaker
I don't know, new critics aside, it's that I think like, oh, attention actually matters to me quite a lot. It's just more mysterious than we sometimes.
01:32:21
Speaker
think of it as being. To be human is to have all kinds of ambivalent and occluded intentions that you don't understand yourself at the time. Lettuces is, I mean, it's the plural that makes it, again, like how we were saying, I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine, it's the mice that make that wine. Funny or particular, I think on market day, I go to the market with my lettuce.
01:32:51
Speaker
It would sound quite different. It would feel quite different. Or my heads of lettuce or something. It does have to be the plural. Yeah. And I thought also, I do think lettuce, when we know what it signifies, is a kind of funny word, but it has a real beauty of sound when I just start to abstract it more and more when I'm just thinking about it. Lettuces. What a lovely
01:33:17
Speaker
also the stupid thing it reminded me of which is like the opening words of proof rock let us let us go then you're just like so embarrassed by your modernist plenty of people will tell me why it's so stupid I'm sure so no but um
01:33:39
Speaker
You know, since I read, and since you just said modernist, and since I had raised a moment ago the Yeats thing of the end of Adam's curse where the moon shows up and it's hollow, you know, a real important difference for me and the way that poem and this poem end, the poems are extremely different in all kinds of ways, is that Yeats ends that, I mean, the last word of that poem is moon, right? And yet we'd grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon is how that poem ends. And here it's like,
01:34:09
Speaker
That moment has happened, but I loved what you were saying earlier, Elise, about how it's like, then there's the sigh and reentry into the world of, I don't know, commerce, or at least, you know, sociality in some sense of like ordinary life moving along, puttering along is what it feels like.
01:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's important that it's, yes, the fact that it keeps moving, but I also think there would be a temptation.
01:34:43
Speaker
I think for me for many poets to have an end of real of clear like beauty and significance or attachment to the world and this is an image where I'm like oh that I mean that doesn't sound that fun to me like going to sell like effort you know in the same way that your solitary soup and your solitary wine are kind of less consoling perhaps than they you know you would like them to be like they are
01:35:11
Speaker
Listen, I'm about to have mine. I mean, I have them all the time. And I go to the market with my lettuces all the time. Do you? Just different lettuces. There's something about it being routine, I think that kind of connects
01:35:36
Speaker
the hollowness to a fuller thing without overstating, I guess, what it is to be human, which is often pretty boring or insufficient in some way to whatever the demands of your soul actually are or what you would like your life to be or perhaps to the imaginings returning to that.
01:35:59
Speaker
discussion we had earlier on transformation and personhood, also perhaps to the person that you would have liked to be or that you still would like to be. And it's interesting, I think. I mean, this poem, you know, is a longer one, although she goes on to write longer ones still in Faithful and Purchase Night. But
01:36:24
Speaker
I think it feels like a very large poem to me and how much it contains. That's so interesting. A large poem and yet a village life as a title suggests a kind of small scale. The voice feels kind of small to me for the most part though it has these kind of extravagant moments of expansion. I think I know what you mean.
01:36:53
Speaker
Or maybe capacious would be a better, just a lot more turns out to be contained than on this, than is necessarily immediate, which is, I guess, always true of poems, but that's why you have this podcast. But it's why we talk about them. But I do think
01:37:11
Speaker
With the mundane, it does remind me both how much of other people is unknowable, but also how much is under the surface in people's lives that you don't know about. So it also calls to mind a kind of universal complication.
01:37:31
Speaker
That's interesting. The lettuces also are the kind of thing which the outside looks like the inside. It's just smaller and smaller versions. Depends on the kind of lettuce, I guess. But in that sense, it's like an onion or something. I guess, although unlike an onion, it has kind of a core sometimes. OK, enough of that. What I've been wanting to ask you to do these last few moments
01:37:59
Speaker
long as the poem might be. I hope this doesn't strain your voice or energy too much. I can probably manage. So let us hear the poem one more time, but in your voice, Elisa. A village life.
01:38:18
Speaker
The death and uncertainty that await me as they await all men. The shadows evaluating me because it can take time to destroy a human being. The element of suspense needs to be preserved. On Sundays, I walk my neighbor's dog so she can go to church to pray for her sick mother. The dog waits for me in the doorway. Summer and winter, we walk the same road early morning at the base of the escarpment.
01:38:49
Speaker
Sometimes the dog gets away from me. For a moment or two, I can't see him behind some trees. He's very proud of this, this trick he brings out occasionally and gives up again as a favor to me. Afterward, I go back to my house to gather firewood. I keep in my mind images from each walk, Menardae growing by the roadside, an early spring, the dog chasing the little gray mice.
01:39:15
Speaker
So for a while, it seems possible not to think of the hold of the body weakening, the ratio of the body to the void shifting, and the prayers becoming prayers for the dead. Midday, the church bells finished, light and excess. Still, fog blankets the meadow so you can't see the mountain in the distance covered with snow and ice.
01:39:42
Speaker
When it appears again, my neighbor thinks her prayers are answered. So much light she can't control her happiness. It has to burst out in language. Hello, she yells, as though that is her best translation. She believes in the virgin the way I believe in the mountain, though in one case the fog never lifts. But each person stores his hope in a different place.
01:40:08
Speaker
I make my soup, I pour my glass of wine. I'm tense, like a child approaching adolescence. Soon it will be decided for certain what you are, one thing, a boy or girl, not both any longer. And the child thinks, I want to have a say in what happens, but the child has no say whatsoever. When I was a child, I did not foresee this.
01:40:35
Speaker
Later, the sun sets, the shadows gather, rustling the low bushes like animals just awake for the night. Inside, there's only firelight. It fades slowly, now only the heaviest woods still flickering across the shelves of instruments. I hear music coming from them sometimes, even locked in their cases.
01:40:59
Speaker
When I was a bird, I believed I would be a man. That's the flute. And the horn answers, when I was a man, I cried out to be a bird. Then the music vanishes, and the secret it confides in me vanishes also. In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth, meaningless but full of messages.
01:41:22
Speaker
It's dead, it's always been dead, but it pretends to be something else, burning like a star and convincingly so that you feel sometimes it could actually make something grow on Earth. If there's an image of the soul, I think that's what it is. I moved through the dark as though it were natural to me, as though I were already a factor in it.
01:41:47
Speaker
tranquil and still, the day dawns. On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces. Well, Lisa Gonzalez, thank you so much for sharing this time with me. It was really moving and meaningful to me. And I shouldn't let the conversation go by without saying something I should have said at the outset that I
01:42:16
Speaker
I want to give you my condolences to the loss of your teacher and friend. And I hope it did something for you to get to spend some time with a poem of hers in conversation. Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you.
01:42:39
Speaker
I wrote a paper about not this poem, but this book for that class with Langdon Hammer. But I hadn't reread it fully for years until I knew we were doing this. And that felt like a beautiful revisitation. And this conversation, as I knew it would, has taught me things and made me feel
01:43:09
Speaker
I don't know, deeply grateful for the vibrancy of Louise's mind and the things that it put in the world. Yeah, well, I feel that way too. So thank you again, and thank you dear listeners for listening along with us. Stay tuned. We will have more conversations for you coming soon. Be well, everyone.