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Langdon Hammer on Louise Glück ("A Foreshortened Journey")
2.1k Plays1 year ago
The second episode in our cluster on the great Louise Glück, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, and who passed away on October 13.
Lanny Hammer rejoins the podcast to talk about his friend and colleague Louise and her poem "A Foreshortened Journey."
Langdon Hammer is Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, where he studies poetry and its place in the culture. Among his recent publications are James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015) and A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021), which he edited with Stephen Yenser. Lanny has also remembered Louise in print: you can find pieces by him about her in The Yale Review and The Paris Review.
I hope you'll hear the beautiful resonances that begin to emerge between the episodes in this cluster—and that, via the poems, they'll give you some sense of the person, the life, and the world she made and left behind.
Make sure you're following the podcast to get new episodes as they roll out, and please share, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Follow my Substack to get occasional updates on the pod and my other work.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Close Readings' and Louise Glück
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm very happy today to have Langdon Hammer on the podcast to talk about his colleague and friend, Louise Glick, who, as you must know by now,
00:00:20
Speaker
recently and shockingly passed away. Lanny is the first repeat guest I've had on the podcast. He was on a very early episode to talk about the poet James Merrill.
00:00:36
Speaker
And I've asked Lanny back on to participate in what I think will be a little cluster of episodes that I'm hoping to host here on the podcast, where we add to the beautiful set of memories that have been coming out in various publications where friends and colleagues and former students of Louise
00:01:01
Speaker
have been sharing their memories of what it was like to know her and to read her and to work alongside her over the years.
Focus on Louise Glück's Poetry and Lanny's Role
00:01:10
Speaker
I thought that one thing that this podcast might add to that mix is to get a chance to sit one by one with a series of poems and to give those a kind of sustained attention that isn't often
00:01:27
Speaker
possible in other kinds of written forms. And so I've invited Lanny back on for that express purpose. The poem Lanny has chosen to talk about today is a poem of hers called A Foreshortened Journey. The poem is a prose poem. You can find a link to it as ever in the episode notes for those who would like to look along as we
00:01:53
Speaker
as we discuss the poem. Let me tell you briefly about our guest in case you missed that early episode or need a quick reminder. Lanny Hammer is the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale University where for the last many years he was a colleague of Louise Glick
00:02:20
Speaker
Lenny is the author of James Merrill, Life and Art, a kind of magisterial biography of a great poet, and the editor with Steven Yenser of A Whole World, Letters from James Merrill. Lenny's also been the editor of two Library of America editions, one of Mae Swenson and one of Hart Crane. Lenny's first book, Academic Monograph, is called Hart Crane and Alan Tate, Janice-Faced Modernism.
00:02:50
Speaker
And that came out from Princeton University Press, this great book, and was followed by a book that Lanny edited called, Oh, My Land, My Friends, which was a selection, a very healthy selection, almost all of the letters I think that one could find at the time, anyway, of Hart Crane's letters.
00:03:10
Speaker
Lanny is also the Poetry Editor at American Scholar, and I've been very happy to see in recent years a new kind of writing beginning to emerge from Lanny.
00:03:24
Speaker
experiments in personal essays that are often also essays of literary criticism too. You can find essays like that in Yale Review and Paris Review, two places where Lanny has published reminiscences of Louise, but also places like Raritan and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Lanny regularly has reviewed poetry for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books,
00:03:54
Speaker
And he's at work, hard at work on a biography, a critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop for FSG. Lanny's also my teacher, as probably most listeners to this podcast know, was my mentor in graduate school and in my undergrad years as well, is the person to whom I owe more than anything in terms of my
00:04:23
Speaker
my own career as a critic and writer and thinker about poetry.
Lanny's Experiences with Louise Glück
00:04:28
Speaker
And I was so moved in particular to read Lanny's piece about Louise, which came out very recently in the Yale Review. And in that piece, one of the things that Lanny does is to recall a kind of momentous occasion, which was I think his first encounter in person with Louise Glick.
00:04:53
Speaker
I believe it was 2002 and all of the former winners of the Bollingen Prize, a prize that it was administered by Yale University and it's kind of major prize for American poetry. All of the living winners of that prize were invited to New Haven and read on the New Haven green
00:05:24
Speaker
Louise read, I think, last at that event, or maybe towards the end, I'm not sure.
00:05:36
Speaker
Lanny describes the expectations that an audience member might have had in attending such an event that there would be a kind of happy celebration of poetic fame. There were a lot of famous poets in the room, after all, that we might be there to sort of think about and to admire the wit
00:06:03
Speaker
and fluency of poetry's public reach. Lanny said that in listening to Louise, he heard a different kind of message, a sort of refusal of those easier forms of consolation, and instead
00:06:22
Speaker
what Louise's way of reading seemed to communicate was this, quote, no, it is about poetry and poetry is about now and your life and about the death all around you and ahead of us all, end quote. It's been very, it's very moved to read those lines in particular and it's been impossible for me since then and having listened and I've been listening to recordings of Louise Reid.
00:06:54
Speaker
On public occasions, it's been impossible not to hear that kind of message as a sort of under sound to all of her poems. And it's a profound message, I think. So with that, I just want to welcome you, Lanny, to the podcast today and to ask you how you're doing. Thank you, Kamal. I'm glad you ordered. Talk about Louisa's poetry with you.
00:07:22
Speaker
I'm glad to have you here. It's a sad occasion. It's the loss of a colleague and friend of yours.
00:07:31
Speaker
And I know you've shared some early memories about your friendship with her in these pieces that I've gestured towards in my introduction of you. I'll make those pieces available to our listeners if they haven't read them already. But I wonder if you might be willing to share for us here and now just some sense of what it was like to get to know Louise Glick.
00:07:54
Speaker
what she was like as a friend and colleague, what your sorts of first impressions with her were like, what it was like to talk with her. Well, as you say, my first impression was listening to her read October, the poem, in September 2002, not very far from 9-11, and to feel
00:08:23
Speaker
blown away by what I was hearing. And I think I was hardly the only person to feel that way. Incidentally, she read third, I think, because she read an alphabetical order. All the poets did. Ash Brown and Creeley had already read. I thought it might have been an order of seniority. I guess that was mostly what we thought. Yeah, right. Well, it was an occasion where
00:08:54
Speaker
Let's see, I think nine eminent poets were standing up to read. All of them were white. And all of them were men. Save one. And most of them, of course, were older. And they were all older than Louise, even Mark Strand, who was fairly close to Louise in age.
00:09:21
Speaker
Anyway, that occasion was really, as I said, blew me away. And it was a profound moment. I got to know Louise as a colleague who was on campus every fall, two days a week, Monday and Tuesday, teaching at first two classes, meeting with students whenever she wasn't teaching, basically.
00:09:50
Speaker
And whenever she wasn't teaching or meeting with students, having a meal with me or some other friend or friends. And I think I got to know Louise much as so many friends of hers did, which is to say, cross a table.
00:10:20
Speaker
ordering food, complaining about the food, enjoying the food, depending, and talking. Louise was a one-on-one person. She knew how to leave the seminar. She wasn't unhappy.
00:10:51
Speaker
group at the table. But she was in her element when she was one-on-one with someone, whether that was over lunch or in her faculty office, talking with a student with lots of other students lined up outside. Right. Louise, I was thinking about this today.
00:11:20
Speaker
was someone that you could really say almost anything to. And I mean, by that, not that she was endlessly open minded or without judgment or irony about
Evolution and Themes in Louise Glück's Poetry
00:11:42
Speaker
what one might say. However, she
00:11:48
Speaker
was a very honest person herself and very ready to talk about things that mattered essentially to her and encouraged one to do the same. And that promoted a kind of freedom and intimacy that's rare. One just doesn't have that many relationships like that. Although she, I think all of her,
00:12:18
Speaker
However, good friends, she had relationships like that. And what I'm describing as one-on-one-ness really resonates with her idea of poetry.
00:12:39
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it occurs to me, Lanny, that of course there are many kinds of poetry and many kinds of poets, but there is at least one tradition which Louise really seems to have participated in, in which poetry is a kind of one-to-one
00:12:59
Speaker
kind of encounter, right? That one has the sense, perhaps in reading a poem, that one is being addressed personally or something. And so that's the sense. I mean, am I on the right track here in terms of the point you're getting at? Well, that's definitely how she talked about poetry in, you know, multiple places in prose, you know, when she was writing about what poetry meant to her.
00:13:29
Speaker
And it's a really important idea for her, but it's also in this leading one. Say more. How so? Well, because it makes it sound so, makes poetry seem like such a private matter. Whereas, you know, I think for Louise, that one-to-one relationship that involves poetic
00:14:00
Speaker
a poetic voice and a reader was really a kind of, at the same time that it's intimate and private, it's a kind of foundational unit for some kind of social life. And if you look at Louise's poetry, really across the,
00:14:29
Speaker
span of it. It is indeed poetry about families, about personal relationships. These all feature in the poetry early and late. But she's also, at the same time, or, you know, precisely through this subject matter,
00:14:56
Speaker
interested in getting at some larger sense of the human, which involves collectivity and involves shared experience, common experience. And if you look at the progression of her later work,
00:15:20
Speaker
Office is quite explicit. A book like Village Life is, you know, very much about self and community. Let's just put it that way for a shorthand. I think Faithful and Virtuous Night in its multiple voices reaches towards something similar.
00:15:51
Speaker
uh the last book of poems is called winter recipes from the collective right yeah and sort of both halves of that title the the idea of a recipe and and the idea of the collective point to models of poetry that um can't can't really be contained by or well described by the kind of intimate private lyric encounter that i mean it's not
00:16:19
Speaker
It's as though the idea that I'm getting and listening to you sort of correct or nudge or describe how the view that I was articulating earlier might feel accurate but misleading is that the kind of personal or private encounter was
00:16:36
Speaker
a kind of door through which her poetry passed again and again to open up into these larger kinds of experience that aren't necessarily limited by the private. I have, oh, go ahead. Yeah, you have a thought?
00:16:52
Speaker
I was just going to say, I think that's right. A door is nice too. It's an image of hers. Exactly, right. From the wild iris.
00:17:08
Speaker
at the end of my suffering there was a door. There was a door, that's right. I saw her, it's on YouTube, an interview or conversation she was having on stage in which she said that she had that line, at the end of my suffering there was a door, before she had anything else that went in the poem and that she thought for a time maybe that was, it was a one line poem, she didn't know what to do with it really.
00:17:33
Speaker
No, it's become perhaps her most famous line or one of them. I have one of them. It's a curse. Who was just saying this recently? This isn't my point.
00:17:56
Speaker
that the syntax of it is so interesting as well as the line break. What if there was a door at the end of my suffering? Oh, right. Not so good. Not good. Not good. If that was one line or if that was even an enjammed line.
00:18:13
Speaker
There was a door enjambment within my suffering. It's very important that it's constructed the way it is. Yeah, it's sort of thrilling. This sounds like I'm reaching now, but it's not a Miltonic sentiment, but it is a kind of Miltonic sort of syntax to put the
00:18:36
Speaker
or kind of Latin it syntax to put that crucial word monosyllabic in this case at the end of the line. I have a question for you, one more question about what it was like to be perhaps a colleague, but a friend in the circumstances that you've described too. That's also just a more general question about the poetry world such as it is.
00:19:02
Speaker
You're a scholar of poetry, a poetry critic, and you work in an English department with a long history of poetry studies and practicing critics of poetry passing through as well.
00:19:19
Speaker
It's also a department that for many years has had a rich tradition of working poets teaching various kinds of courses in creative writing, the kind of discipline that we have come to understand is called creative writing. And I guess I just wonder what it felt like to have the
00:19:45
Speaker
sort of within the context of an English department for a poetry scholar who works on modern and contemporary poetry to form a relationship with a poet who's at the same time sort of producing the poems that in some cases you might be assigning in class and writing about in some way. I mean, was that
00:20:07
Speaker
And so I'm interested in your perspective on that. I'm also interested in what your memory is of Louise's attitude about that. I mean, I've encountered poets who have all kinds of attitudes across the sort of spectrum of the work that you and I do of the work that scholars do. It ranges from sort of deep suspicion and hostility to
00:20:33
Speaker
admiration and deference and sort of everything in between. And I guess I just wonder what that was like, what that aspect of the relationship was like for you with Louise. I wish now that I had taught Louise more than I did. And in fact, I'm just thinking,
00:20:58
Speaker
this summer, no, I actually don't think they just teach a Louise class and get her in on this and make that happen. And of course, I was too late. It's an example of ways in which I think I took this extraordinary person a little too much for granted.
00:21:26
Speaker
How did, well, let's see, there are lots of parts for that question. One part that I'll pick up is the question of, in a way, what was Louise's relation to the English department, the rest of the English department, besides creative writing? And for that matter, what was her relationship to criticism and to scholarship? These other ways of relating to encountering, responding to
00:21:56
Speaker
poetry. I think Louise was always interested in critics and in criticism. She wanted to read stuff I wrote that had no immediate bearing on her work or others. I know she'd like to read
00:22:24
Speaker
biographical writing that I did about James Merrill. I think one of her favorite books in the past few years was Karen Rothman's biography of John Ashbury, which I think completely changed her view of Ashbury. So interesting. Because Karen's incredible work had excavated the kind of connection between Ashbury's poetry and
00:22:54
Speaker
his childhood, his life circumstances, and this was revelatory for Louise and she loved that. I think
00:23:07
Speaker
That book for people who don't know it is called The Songs We Know Best. And it's a biography of Ashbury's early years, really, the first sort of part of his life. And what Lanny's too modest to tell you here is that Karen, like me, both students of Lanny's as well. And I think maybe there's a sort of a way of thinking about the relationship between biography and poetry that's important to you and that's resonated with her.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah, maybe. But I think that she, Louise, she admired intellectual projects and considered criticism and other kinds of scholarly work as part of a creative biography. And she was, in that sense,
00:24:09
Speaker
I think very much open to other stuff going on in the English department, although I think she did tend to read through the person, as it were, and read, you know, she would care about what you wrote because you wrote it. That was a dimension of, you know, that she would understand
00:24:41
Speaker
What a critic or maybe a psychoanalyst or a historian was doing via that person's creative projects. I taught Louise's work a bit in my classes. She read a lot on campus, which was terrific.
00:25:10
Speaker
I was able to publish in the American Scholar with short introductions, poems from Village Life and then Faithful and Virtuous Night and then later Winter Recipes. So there were these occasions where I was
00:25:37
Speaker
seeing Louise's work in progress and trying to make sense of it, introduce it to a wider audience in that modest context of a short profile in that magazine, The American Scholar. For me, fascinatingly, that gave me some
00:26:08
Speaker
look into her creative process and how she constructed a book and the way her work started to take shape. And I think anyone who knows her work knows this, but perhaps for those who are not already familiar with it, it should be stressed that each of her books is itself a kind of poetic work.
00:26:36
Speaker
that is integral and coherent. It's not just a collection of the poems she's written over the last three or four or five years. And each of those books had a kind of
00:26:56
Speaker
a narrative of their making, let's call it that. And do you mean a sort of implicit narrative that one can begin to infer from a reading of the book, but also the kind of thing that she would talk about in conversation or interviews or whatever about the sort of story of how that book came to be? Well, both, both, both those things. I mean, I think that
00:27:23
Speaker
Yes, as one of these books took shape, the
00:27:31
Speaker
the way in which that happened was itself a kind of story that ultimately can be read out of the book, so to speak. And which she was also kind of ready to talk about because Louise was very comfortable taking questions in public. She liked that. Her readings almost always had
00:27:57
Speaker
you know, substantial Q and A's. She took that very seriously. And she was more comfortable being asked questions than, say, being asked to write a lecture or produce an account without the presence of an interlocutor, so to speak.
00:28:21
Speaker
It's interesting to think about this sort of dialogic dimension because you've talked about and written about how her poetry wants to sort of address readers, she wants to talk to you, you know, but I love this idea that she wanted to be asked questions, that you could see that she took a kind of pleasure or had a sort of willingness to be asked.
00:28:45
Speaker
for her thoughts. And I think you've also written about and have mentioned briefly in passing here her interest in sort of the psychoanalytic model of exchange too, and I can see ways in which that might be relevant to what you've just been saying too.
Deep Dive into 'A Foreshortened Journey'
00:29:02
Speaker
Lanny, let's
00:29:03
Speaker
Let's listen to a recording. We happen to have a recording of Louise Glick reading a foreshortened journey, the poem that you've put in front of us today. Well, why don't we say this? We'll play the recording, and then maybe I can invite you to talk a little bit about what it was that led you to choose this poem of the many options that lay before you.
00:29:32
Speaker
Okay. Here's Louise Glick. A foreshortened journey. I found the stairs somewhat more difficult than I had expected. And so I sat down, so to speak, in the middle of the journey.
00:29:51
Speaker
Because there was a large window opposite the railing, I was able to entertain myself with the little dramas and comedies of the street outside. Though no one I knew passed by, no one certainly who could have assisted me, nor were the stairs themselves in use as far as I could see. You must get up, my lad, I told myself.
00:30:19
Speaker
Since this seemed suddenly impossible, I did the next best thing. I prepared to sleep. My head and arms on the stair above, my body crouched below. Sometime after this, a little girl appeared at the top of the staircase holding the hand of an elderly woman. Grandmother cried the little girl, there is a dead man on the staircase.
00:30:49
Speaker
We must let him sleep, said the grandmother. We must walk quietly by. He is at that point in life at which neither returning to the beginning nor advancing to the end seems bearable. Therefore, he has decided to stop here in the midst of things, though this makes him an obstacle to others such as ourselves. But we must not give up hope
00:31:19
Speaker
In my own life, she continued there was such a time, though that was long ago. And here she let her granddaughter walk in front of her so they could pass me without disturbing me. I would have liked to hear the whole of her story, since she seemed, as she passed by, a vigorous woman, ready to take pleasure in life
00:31:46
Speaker
and at the same time forthright without illusions. But soon their voices faded into whispers or they were far away. Will we see him when we return? The child murmured. He will be long gone by then, said her grandmother. He will have finished climbing up or down as the case may be. Then I will say goodbye now, said the little girl.
00:32:17
Speaker
and she knelt below me chanting a prayer I recognized as the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Sir, she whispered, my grandmother tells me you are not dead, but I thought perhaps this would soothe you in your terrors and I will not be here to sing it at the right time. When you hear this again, she said,
00:32:45
Speaker
Perhaps the words will be less intimidating if you remember how you first heard them in the voice of a little girl. So that's Louise Glick reading For Short and Journey. Lenny,
00:33:05
Speaker
Tell us first what it was that led you to this poem and maybe also share with us what it is you hear anew in listening to the recording. Well, I chose it because Louise chose it. That is to say, anytime she read in my hearing in the past what
00:33:32
Speaker
six years or so, she read this poem, among others. She included it in the selection of her poetry that's up on the Nobel Prize website. Clearly, she wanted to share this poem with us. And I've always found it completely
00:33:59
Speaker
disarming and moving and mysterious. And let me say right away, I don't have a reading of this. I've never taught it. I've never written about it. Maybe we can make some sense of it together.
00:34:22
Speaker
there is, well, I've got lots of different things to say. Go ahead, say some of them. And then of course, I have questions that might lead us. Yeah. It also occurs to me that some of my ways into it lead out of it. What do you mean? What do you mean by that? Well, first of all, this is a poem that is included in Faithful and Virtuous Night. Yeah.
00:34:52
Speaker
I mentioned earlier that Louise's books create holes and that they evolve in certain ways. And that is to say they're both their writing process and then ultimately the text that she's created.
00:35:22
Speaker
In the case of Faithful and Virtuous Night, so far as I know, she created initially a series of dramatic monologues for We Are to Infer, an older British painter who has suffered
00:35:52
Speaker
the loss of his parents when he was a young child. And these are poems that she wrote, free verse poems, these dramatic monologues, after her book, Village Life. Now, whenever Louise began the work on a new book, she was determined to do something different from what she had done before.
00:36:22
Speaker
And a village life is full of these long lines that are often very colloquial that represent stories from a kind of Mediterranean village of the mind. Well, when she started writing this book,
00:36:52
Speaker
with this painter as a speaker, she really was doing something different. I found it completely haunting these dramatic monologues that she had produced. You know, here was Louise at whatever age writing these poems from the point of view of it seemed a man who had had the life experience that her poems described.
00:37:22
Speaker
It was a bit like a psychoanalytic case study in narrative content. But it was, and it was a voice that was highly formal, immensely careful and subtle, and sounded quite different from most of the voices in a village life.
00:37:52
Speaker
Anyway, I say all that to say I was really excited about what she was doing. And then she started doing different things because Louise, I think, did not want her books to have a kind of singular voice or speaker. She liked a kind of
00:38:16
Speaker
limited polyphony. She liked to play different voices and indeed different kinds of poems, different registers of diction off of each other. And one way in which she developed this book was to disappoint me at first because I wanted her to
00:38:39
Speaker
I wanted to have a whole book about this person that I found fascinating, that is this painter character. But no, that's not what she was doing. The book would be called The Painter or something. Yeah, right. It would be a different book.
00:38:55
Speaker
The poems that, she included other poems, including poems movingly really in proprio persona, you know, really Louise speaking, such as the poem at the very end of the book, the penultimate poem, which is called A Summer Garden. And it's an elegy for her mother who died at 101, a remarkable age, in I believe 2011.
00:39:25
Speaker
And that's, you know, she names her mother Beatrice in that poem. So there were poems in the book that were, you know, very much not this older painter speaking. But she also interjected a series of prose poems.
00:39:52
Speaker
Now, just before we spoke, I thought, oh my God, I better go check on this. Had Louise ever written a prose poem before? A quick perusal of the, you know, what is it, 600 something pages of her poems 1962 to 2012 suggests that no, she had never had written a prose poem before.
00:40:19
Speaker
or had never seen fit to include one in a published volume, in other words. Right. But here there are these different prose poems. And there are a number of different, I think, impulses and sources for these prose poems, which I think are quite extraordinary.
00:40:47
Speaker
The most important and obvious one, most important and obvious source being Kafka. She read Kafka's paradoxes and parables probably in the Muir translation and was very excited by them. I mean, this sounds like Kafka. I mean, this one. It almost sounds...
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's a sense of almost Kafka tribute in this poem in particular, I think. But you hear it, too, in some of the other prose poems in the spine. But let me digress a little bit further.
00:41:37
Speaker
I told you that my ways into this are involved going out of the poem. That's fine. Yeah, please. Louise was a great reader of prose. What kind of prose did she like? She liked to read prose fiction. And I mean, I think she read lots of different kinds of prose. She wrote garden catalogs. She read food magazines.
00:42:06
Speaker
But she liked to read prose fiction, and I think that fed her own writing in a very direct way. I think Katia, she was very interested in before she started writing A Village Life. She liked to read Iris Murdoch. Kafka is obviously very important here.
00:42:36
Speaker
And, you know, lots of other writers too. I don't mean to limit it. And there was something about those prose voices. Some not all being first person voices that I think was very generative for her. And she wanted some of that quality of that voice and sensibility in her own.
00:43:05
Speaker
writing and in Confocas parables are very much at play here in these prose poems in this one in particular. That presence is palpable to me. It does seem like there's
00:43:32
Speaker
I want to be careful here not to pretend to be the kind of authority
Narrative Techniques and Influences
00:43:37
Speaker
that I'm not. I'm not sure that I know her work well enough to say this exactly, but it feels to me as though there's this emerging interest in the idea of character almost in the way that a fiction writer imagines who a character might be that is
00:43:53
Speaker
something I don't find as often in poetry, and so that might be another way prose is coming in. Having said all of that, in the first sentence of this poem, I found the stairs somewhat more difficult than I had expected, and so I sat down, so to speak, in the middle of the journey. The last phrase in that sentence
00:44:22
Speaker
must, I think, be an allusion to a very famous poem, though a narrative one. So there's that. But I'm thinking of course of Dante and of the first lines of Inferno, which are translated variously, but always something like
00:44:40
Speaker
in the middle of life's journey or at the midpoint of my life, something like that. So I'm curious, and then my ears perked up a little bit, actually, I have to say, when you reminded me that her mother's name is Beatrice too, that's interesting.
00:44:58
Speaker
But let's set that to one side, maybe, unless you want to do something with it. I wonder, at the level of tone or at the level of sort of, I don't know, setting or establishing the kind of voice of the poem or something, what do you make of Dante's presence in the first line of the poem? It's qualified with this so to speak, which feels important to me, too.
00:45:25
Speaker
What, you know, what's Dante doing here and what's so to speak doing to Dante's presence here? I mean, is it irony or what? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the real Louise touch there is so to speak. You know, she, she loves to include these phrases, again, much more common from prose than verse, so to speak, as it were.
00:45:54
Speaker
other phrases that acknowledge and gesture towards the kind of self-consciousness about language choice, just to remind us that there's a kind of archness, self-consciousness about everything being put forward here. It's not
00:46:24
Speaker
Nothing is unmediated. Yeah, I mean, it's, I think in this particular case, that bit of self-consciousness is also a bit of modesty as she makes the big gesture. That is, as she invokes a trope as
00:46:54
Speaker
time-worn, unmistakable, and resonant as the one she's about to deliver. It's almost a way of sort of apologizing for it preemptively or something, or saying, you and I both know what I'm doing here. What's funny to me is that at that moment, I mean, it would have been weird had she used quotation marks there.
00:47:21
Speaker
that would have been a conspicuous thing to do, but elsewhere in the poem there is dialogue and nowhere does she use quotation marks. So there is something, I think there is something interesting about the way she's kind of finding other ways to flag
00:47:40
Speaker
I don't know what in a kind of jargony way I might say it's like her citational practice, but we could just say the sort of presence of other people's words and the words of her voices. Right. Good. That's right. And the fact that the quotation marks aren't there ever, it seems, makes the kind of passage in and out of other voices and the primary voice of the poem somewhat more fluid, perhaps, than it would be otherwise.
00:48:10
Speaker
um that's right and and you know importantly it's a dramatic monologue right uh this is a first person poem you know i found the stairs though am i right lanny that it does it wouldn't make sense to take this as a dramatic monologue in the voice of the painter character who who is the speaker of other poems in the book or might it be i don't know yeah well you know what's i i find
00:48:39
Speaker
The framing of the poem kind of fascinating and strange insofar as we have a speaker who is describing a moment of breakdown, a kind of despair, a kind of refusal to go on or go back on the stair.
00:49:19
Speaker
His perspective is recedes as he becomes in a way a kind of narrator of what his breakdown allows him to observe, which is the, well, first of all, these little dramas and comedies of the street.
00:49:39
Speaker
our everyday life, but which ultimately are of no assistance to him. But then, crucially, he observes as if he were at once fully observant, but invisibly so. He observes the grandmother and the daughter and their exchange about him.
00:50:09
Speaker
And then by the end of the poem, we have only their language and we don't have anything more from him and we don't know anything about him. The only thing we are to infer, I think, is that when they return, the grandmother and the daughter, he will be, as Louise puts it, long gone.
00:50:38
Speaker
by that. And he will have finished climbing up or down, as the case may be. And then he becomes almost like a third-person narrator, or he's already kind of morphed into that role. Then I will say goodbye now, said the little girl.
00:51:03
Speaker
If you just had that, in other words, you wouldn't know that there was an eye. It might as well be a sort of abstracted narrator. Right. And that's produced in a way by virtue of the fact that he's sort of totally immobile, can't speak, has broken down, as you put it. It sort of reduces him to the status of narrator. Right. Yeah. And kind of comically, he's just a body crouched.
00:51:30
Speaker
to sleep, my head and arms on the stair above, my body crouched below. Crouch is such a resonant term. You crouch, I suppose, well, if you fear a blow or if you want to hide, I suppose
00:51:52
Speaker
if you were a cat before you pounced. Before you leaped. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, although it doesn't seem like that's going to happen. No, it doesn't. Does it?
00:52:03
Speaker
Just before that word in that moment, there's this line that makes, I mean, it's sort of one thing that I'm noting, and this goes all the way back, I guess, to the fact of the performance of the public reading, is that to read this poem on the page is maybe to miss something that's audible, more audible when you hear it, which is that she gets laughs
00:52:25
Speaker
There's a kind of nervous laughter or some kind of strange laughter that I was hearing and that for me there's like the line, you must get up my lad. The my lad is a, I don't know why, but it's a funny phrase to me.
00:52:42
Speaker
funny maybe because it's, I don't know, help me with it. It does sound sort of British for one thing, but it's also British. It sounds jocular. And so it's more funny to hear it in her voice than it would be to hear it in the voice of an actually jocular, actually British person. Right. Right. Right.
00:53:05
Speaker
Yeah, right. So part of the charm and humor of the poem has to do with a certain kind of ventriloquism. Yeah. That that is a interesting misfit with the... Right. It's a kind of dissonance. Right. Misalignments a good word for it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that raises the question, too, of where is Louise, as it were? Where is the poet in this? And
00:53:33
Speaker
which is a question that, you know, you have to ask about almost any of her poems. What is her relation to her speaker? In that sense, Louise is really inhabits this long tradition of the dramatic monologue in English poetry where there's a kind
00:54:01
Speaker
complex play between a kind of lyric first person and a theatrical, ventriloquist, performative, dramatic utterance. And this is an interesting take on it because there are other voices that come into the poem that might also be sites of her identification.
Life, Death, and Generational Themes
00:54:26
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, no, no, it's quite, it's wonderful, isn't it? I mean, she's
00:54:32
Speaker
I think of her as somehow all of the characters in the poem. I said earlier, we don't know what happened to this man. And indeed, we don't, except that we know that he's written this poem. So he has, you know, we don't know whether he's gone up or down or, you know,
00:54:59
Speaker
exactly where he is on the stairs, but he is in a position to recall and represent this incident. Right. Right. As I began to read it in preparation for this conversation, I
00:55:25
Speaker
thought at first, oh, perhaps he's dying. And the conversation between, or the things the grandmother says, you know, grandmother cried the little girl, there is a dead man on the staircase. We must let him sleep, said the grandmother. That's an interesting
00:55:44
Speaker
sort of not fully engaged kind of exchange between the grandmother and the granddaughter. She doesn't, she just corrects the terms of what the granddaughter said, but silently as it were. But that, you know, I thought, well, maybe the grandmother is being euphemistic or protecting the child from a scene of death or something like that. But then that, you know, as you say, the implication seems to be that he will be
00:56:14
Speaker
gone. It seems as though he has some consciousness that's registering the things that are being said to him insofar as he can keep them within earshot anyway. And if we take seriously the in the middle of the journey moment,
00:56:33
Speaker
Well, you know, that suggests there's more journey left to go on. On the other hand, the title of the poem perhaps cuts against that. So indeterminate, maybe. You know, Louise's voice sounds most like the voice of a grandmother here. But I know there's a kind of long-standing preoccupation in her work
00:57:02
Speaker
that has to do with the kind of collapsing of age and youth or of memory and life in the present tense. So I can see her occupying all of these positions. What...
00:57:26
Speaker
You know, for people who aren't looking at the poem, like we've been saying, it's in prose. It's in three paragraphs, I want to say. The paragraphs diminish in length as it goes on, right? So the longest block is first, and then there's a kind of middling one, and then a very short one, a single sentence, a paragraph of its own at the end.
00:57:52
Speaker
Maybe this is an opportunity, Lanny, for you to reflect on, in general, sort of how you take it Louis' thought of things like stanzas, to which these paragraphs are sort of related in some way, or simply to make some observation about what that kind of diminishment of length as a sequence is sort of revealing to you about the sort of structure of this poem.
00:58:23
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's the case that white space is really important in Louise's poetry. That is to say the pause is between lines, the pause is between stanzas. It's part of the kind of temporal rhythm
00:58:53
Speaker
It is, I mean, the kind of timing of her writing. There's also a kind of inability in her writing to make terse-ness and gaps resonant.
00:59:24
Speaker
without necessarily giving us space to, let's say, well, space to think and feel.
00:59:42
Speaker
This poem is an interesting case of that insofar as she doesn't do much with it, but she does something still significant with it. Big block of prose, less big block, then a little envoy, as if this were some kind of
01:00:13
Speaker
formal ending, that last single sentence that had been added to the poem. It's interesting because the first bit of narrative ends with the grandmother talking to the little daughter
01:00:38
Speaker
Excuse me, to her granddaughter, the little child, and saying, you know, we must not give up hope in my own life. And this seemed significant. She continued, there was such a time. I have been in that position of breakdown. I have been a sleeping figure on the stairs, though that was long ago. And then they pass on.
01:01:06
Speaker
And then at that moment, we get that space, that sort of end of anecdote, it seems, but there's going to be more. And the first person speaker says, it gives the kind of tribute to the grandmother. And I have to say that the grandmother is very much Louise here.
01:01:30
Speaker
I would have liked to hear the whole of her story since she seemed, as she passed by, a vigorous woman, ready to take pleasure in life, and at the same time, forthright, without illusions. That's the reason. Yes, I think so. As indeed she was, all of those things. Or at least, you know, a kind of ego ideal that is represented by the grandmother. Right. But their voices faded away.
01:01:58
Speaker
But they don't fade away entirely. And then we have this immensely poignant exchange in which the child anxiously asks, will we see him when we return? Where are they going? We don't know.
01:02:25
Speaker
She's already confident of returning wherever it is that they're going. I have some little drama in my mind. They're doing a kind of perfectly ordinary thing. They're going to market or something like that. They're coming back to their building or something like that. But yes, you're right. I can't defend that position. It's just the sense I have.
01:02:51
Speaker
Yeah, well, they're everybody's moving in a kind of symbolic landscape, but we don't know. We don't know very well how to interpret their movements. But we do know that the child is anxious about leaving him and not saying goodbye properly.
01:03:18
Speaker
Is it significant that there's this sort of gap in generational gap, in other words, between, you know, like I think of Bishop in Sestina or something, you know, with the granddaughter and the grandmother and the kind of missing generation in between? Is there some
01:03:35
Speaker
you know, might at some level, what's sort of motivating the anxiety here on the part of the child be a kind of, you know, projection and now using more sort of psychoanalytic language here, but a kind of projection of the parental role onto the sort of onto the figure on the stairs, you know, the kind of missing father figure or something like that. Yeah. Well, he's in the middle of a journey and he's in
01:04:04
Speaker
the generational middle, I suppose, of these three figures. I think what's particularly touching to me about the little girl's concern here is that the anxiety seems to be a kind of anxiety about his welfare and not for herself and a kind of desire to care for him or to see that he is cared for, which,
01:04:35
Speaker
takes the form, as it turns out, of her chanting for him the Hebrew prayer for the dead, the kaddish. Sir, she whispered, my grandmother tells me you are not dead, though you look dead to me. But I thought perhaps this would soothe you in your terrors, and somehow she knows that he has terrors.
01:05:05
Speaker
I mean, the kind of wisdom that the child possesses is uncanny, too. And I will not be here to sing it at the right time. Yeah, and then there's a, I mean, how are we to understand this, that the little girl
01:05:34
Speaker
in effect performs a funeral rite, that is not appropriate at the moment, but we all know will be at a later moment to be deferred. Part of what's uncanny about that is that at that moment, he won't
01:05:57
Speaker
I mean, there won't be any consciousness at all, right? Presumably, right. Right. But it's as though the poem doesn't sort of concede that or like in this universe, it doesn't work that way. It's like when he's dead, he will be more or less as he is now. Well, right. And he will be hearing it because when you hear this again. Yeah, that's right.
01:06:26
Speaker
but she's sort of planting a future memory for him. Yeah. Perhaps the words will be less intimidating if you remember how you first heard them in the voice of a little girl.
Jewishness, Humor, and Human Attitudes
01:06:40
Speaker
Yeah. Uh, I mean, I have to laugh because it's, it's just, it's very hard to, to,
01:06:55
Speaker
put into other words what Lewis has managed to say here. Well, yeah, go on and try. I have a question. Okay, I'll ask. Yeah, good. So if we're just to back up for the moment and sort of ramp up again to the ending there.
01:07:14
Speaker
I think you so helpfully pointed out the ways in which as the man, the speaker of the poem describes the vigorous woman who is the grandmother that he's describing a version of Louise herself, that that's a sort of recognizable character to you and I'm sure to others who knew her well.
01:07:43
Speaker
says to her granddaughter, has said to her granddaughter, and I suppose we should, you know, credit this with sort of truth or sincerity or whatever. I was once like this man, but then I got up and went on, you know, we should have courage, in other words. I wonder,
01:08:14
Speaker
You know, I wonder, like let's, for the sake of argument, sort of posit that the three points of view, human points of view represented in this poem, the three characters who get to speak in this poem, are that what we're getting is a kind of dramatized version of sort of
01:08:37
Speaker
three attitudes towards life that might all be contained in a self or in Louise or in anyone, in you and me. And that there is a part of us that wants to lie down on the stairs and not get up. There's a part of us that
01:09:01
Speaker
you know, and actually that one too, he addresses himself, you must get up my lad. And he sort of addresses himself as a child, as though he weren't, like an adult speaking to a child, right? As if he still had the vigor of youth. Right. So, you know, what's the question that I'm sort of kind of edging around here? Is there
01:09:26
Speaker
is there some kind of, insofar as this feels like a parable, like a Kafkaesque parable, is the idea that what the poem is thinking about are the kinds of
01:09:50
Speaker
stories we might tell ourselves or consolations we might provide to ourselves that allow us to get up and go on or to die.
01:10:07
Speaker
when it's time to die. I'm also thinking about what you've told me, and forgive me, I can't remember if, and perhaps written, I can't remember if you've said it here in our conversation, but when Louise got the very terrible news of her own diagnosis,
01:10:30
Speaker
I was sort of moved by your description of her own attitude about it in conversation with you. And so naturally, I'm thinking about that as we're having this conversation, which seems to be about sort of how one comes to terms with one's own foreshortened journey. I mean, all of our journeys are foreshortened. Even her mother who lived to 101, let's say.
01:10:59
Speaker
So is there something in there for you, Lanny, that is helping? There's a lot in there. I think you're getting at the complexity of the poem and its resonance. One thing I guess I wanted to say is just as the grandmother identifies with the man on the stairs, I think Louise understood
01:11:30
Speaker
despair and understood desire not to go on. Not, notwithstanding her own sort of vigorous decision to go on. Yeah. Right. Well, right. Well, right. I mean, I mean, in some of my writing about Louise, I stressed, you know, what a driven person she was, you know, and how, how
01:12:02
Speaker
motivated she was to excel, to climb the stairs, to win prizes, to write these books, et cetera. That's a big part of Louise. But there was also, crucially, a person who understood despair, as I'm saying, and understood breakdown and malfunction.
01:12:32
Speaker
and the desire to sleep. And I see this poem as in some way and connects it. This poem connects that experience, the experience to withdraw, to hide, to a kind of, let's say, a fear of death that is like dying.
01:13:04
Speaker
That's a pretty good simulacrum. We can't tell whether you're asleep or actually dead. We might call it depression or something. They might call it depression. As simple as that. As profound as that. And this poem gives full space to that experience and yet frames it with a kind of
01:13:32
Speaker
care and consolation that is very powerful. I think there's a lot to be said about Louisa's Jewishness. I don't exactly know how to take up the subject properly. The fact that
01:13:56
Speaker
The Hebrew prayer for the dead is what is being said here seems significant and important. And maybe Kafka as a model is important as well. I was going to say, maybe that's part of the connection there too. And that Jewishness is obviously rooted in, or rather is a kind of ground for sensibility that we hear, maybe a ground for a voice.
01:14:25
Speaker
in a sense of humor that is part of what is getting people to chuckle nervously, as you notice in the public reading that you have recorded. Yeah. So that's another context that the poem opens onto that's enormous.
01:14:53
Speaker
Right, and I'm sure I am no more than you claim to be the right person to give the authoritative account of what Jewishness might be doing here, but
01:15:08
Speaker
in terms of consolations for death or ways of thinking about death, it's not the same, we might say, just as a obvious thing to say, but that might lead to other thoughts too, as the Catholic view that Dante, for instance, might imagine. There's an entirely different orientation to
01:15:37
Speaker
notions of afterlife. I also find myself thinking at the end of this poem of another of Louise's very famous lines, and I'm doing a risky thing here, which is to say lines are famous, and then I'm going to try to quote them from memory, which I'm bound to fail. But isn't it in the poem Nostos, we look at the world once in childhood, the rest is memory.
01:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, there's, you know, whatever one thinks about how sort of ironic or sincere or whatever, you know, what kind of reading, what sort of attitude we should take towards a pronouncement like that. There's a way in this poem where
01:16:26
Speaker
it's as though the parts of the self have been disambiguated, but then dramatized all within a scene. It's interesting to me that the child is the one providing the consolation here. The notion of a cleaving apart of a message from the voice that carries it, perhaps this message which
01:16:55
Speaker
might be terrifying to hear will have been domesticated for you in some way or sweetened for you in some way. If you hear it, if you remember that the first time you heard it, it was in the voice of a little girl. Or maybe a little girl listening to the voice. I mean, that is to say,
01:17:22
Speaker
you don't have to tease out too much of the poem to understand the kaddish as being perhaps something Louise would have heard as a child. And that would relate to early experience and maybe first experiences of death. And might recently have heard for her mother.
01:17:50
Speaker
Indeed. Indeed. And that she, Louise, would have in some ways though 70 or 69 or 68 at the time of her mother's death would nevertheless also have been a little girl.
01:18:14
Speaker
Sure. I suppose when a parent dies, you might well feel like a child, however old you happen to be at the time. I liked what you were saying earlier about the non-Christianness in the kind of lack of any gesture towards resurrection, which
01:18:44
Speaker
is a theme of the wild iris, needless to say, which Louise has visited before. It's not as if it isn't in her repertoire. One last thing to say about space, spacing in the poem, and maybe it's a good note to end on, that comment about the
01:19:10
Speaker
lack of afterlife projected in this poem seems to me to correct something I just was saying earlier. I was saying that, you know, there's an important space between the first and the second paragraph and an important space between the second and the final paragraph, the little third paragraph that is a kind of envoy. Well, I neglected the space after that.
01:19:38
Speaker
The rest of that white page, that's resonant too. And earlier I was talking about the kind of mysterious, as it were, disappearance of the speaker as he turns the poem over to the grandmother and the little girl and ultimately just to the little girl.
01:20:06
Speaker
I think that that disappearance is both audibly, invisibly felt through the period after Little Girl and the white space that involves it.
Conclusion and Farewell
01:20:23
Speaker
The rest is silence.
01:20:27
Speaker
Lanny, this has been a really beautiful conversation and I've learned so much and I've been really grateful to get to spend the time through your person with Louise's work and with her and with this poem.
01:20:49
Speaker
We've heard her read it once out loud, and I know we've been talking for a while, but I've come to learn also that when I don't end an episode by asking my guests to read the poem again out loud, I hear from listeners who say that they want that, that they like to hear the poem a second time having heard the conversation. So I wonder if you could indulge us as a way to end with a reading of the poem in your own voice. A foreshortened journey
01:21:19
Speaker
I found the stairs somewhat more difficult than I had expected. And so I sat down, so to speak, in the middle of the journey. Because there was a large window opposite the railing, I was able to entertain myself with the little dramas and comedies on the street outside, though no one I knew passed by. No one, certainly, who could have assisted me. Nor were the stairs themselves in use, as far as I could see.
01:21:50
Speaker
You must get up, my lad," I told myself. Since this seemed suddenly impossible, I did the next best thing. I prepared to sleep. My head and arms on the stair above, my body crouched below. Sometime after this, a little girl appeared at the top of the staircase, holding the hand of an elderly woman.
01:22:20
Speaker
cried the little girl, there's a dead man on the staircase. We must let him sleep, said the grandmother. We must walk quietly by. He is at that point in life at which neither returning to the beginning nor advancing to the end seems bearable. Therefore, he has decided to stop here in the midst of things, though this makes him an obstacle to others, such as ourselves.
01:22:50
Speaker
But we must not give up hope. In my own life, she continued, there was such a time, though that was long ago. And here, she let her granddaughter walk in front of her so they could pass me without disturbing me. I would have liked to hear the whole of her story since she seemed, as she passed by, a vigorous woman, ready to take pleasure in life.
01:23:20
Speaker
and at the same time forthright, without illusions. But soon their voices faded into whispers, or they were far away. Will we see him when we return? The child murmured. He will be long gone by then, said her grandmother. He will have finished climbing up or down, as the case may be.
01:23:48
Speaker
Then I will say goodbye now, said the little girl. And she knelt below me, chanting a prayer I recognized as the Hebrew prayer for the dead. Sir, she whispered, my grandmother tells me you are not dead. But I thought perhaps this would soothe you in your terrors. And I will not be here to sing it at the right time. When you heard this again, she said,
01:24:18
Speaker
perhaps the words will be less intimidating if you remember how you first heard them in the voice of a little girl.
01:24:30
Speaker
Well, Lanny Hammer, thank you again for the gift of this conversation and thank you for sharing your time with us. Thank you listeners for sitting with us for the last hour and a half and I wish you well more soon.