Event Review
Louise Glück and Karl Kirchwey (2/4)

Minimalist Ennui and Intellectual Irony
at the 92nd St Y's Unterberg Poetry Center (Feb 4)
by Daniela Gioseffi

Louise Glück is a poet of internal concerns, personal love, divorce, disappointment, ennui, life inside of one's own room or garden. It's almost as if, in her latest book, The Seven Ages, there is no world beyond her psyche as it recollects past emotions—not in tranquillity, as Wordsworth said, but in disquietude. She writes of the personal "me" and "we," not of the world's "we" out there where people starve and die and wars are waged. She reads to her audience with clarity, but in a droning chant that has no emotional range or vocal variety. Yet, every word is enunciated clearly, which is more than one can say for many poets who read aloud. Her poetry, too, is clear, not difficult to understand. She writes by her own creed of simple language, as spelled out in her essay, "The Education of the Poet."

Last Monday evening, Glück sold out the Y's smaller upstairs theatre with her co-reader Karl Kirchwey, who read first. As the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards as well, she obviously has a following, no doubt helped greatly by the praise she's received from writers like Helen Vendler and Robert Hass, and the nurturing of her career by Daniel Halperin of Ecco Press who has been her constant, admiring publisher for years through more than ten books. The latest book, The Seven Ages, is not as compelling as The Wild Iris, which won her the Pulitzer, but it is capably written. Glück is masterful with her simple language, but one can't find the passion of a rich emotional life, rather, there is a tone of boredom, ennui, disappointment that does not abate. Even though Glück does see beauty in some natural things, eroticism, sensual delight for nature, for sexuality, for food, seems absent from her work.

Her essay on the narcissism in American poetry in The Three Penny Review a few years back was well written and necessary, but bogged down in abstracted intellectual meandering, just as she was getting really sharp on the issue. It was not thoroughly satisfying to the reader—perhaps because she didn't want to use examples from the poets she might offend. Yet, one can't create a climate of critical taste without offense. One can't just go about saying one loves everyone's poetry andstill have a sense of ethics about what good art is. Too many American poets schmooze more than they critique—though I don't believe in cruel or vicious insults, as everyone attempting the art deserves respect.

There's no denying that a sharp intelligence operates in Glück's work.

She reads with an almost angry tone, pushing the poems at you in a repetitive chant, almost daring you to enter into them, and she refuses to interrupt them with any of the patter or friendly banter often used by poets to seduce an audience. This is because she wants them to come at you in their sequential pattern without interruption and that's okay. One doesn't have to do what she calls "chat" between poems to give a successful reading. There are those poets who overdo patter, burying the poem in it. Very occasionally, she exhibits a bit of dry wit, but the poems, about lost love, about sunbathing with her sister in the yard—applying nail polish trying to get the shade just right with their hope of a bright tomorrow comforting their teenage leisure—just do not delight or excite with any visceral or sensual joy or reach any fullness of emotional range. They do not fulfill Dickinson's definition of poetry: "I know it's poetry if I feel exactly like the top of my head has been taken off." They are intellectual, private, self-involved with the me and the we of a self-important and small world of longing, anticipation, and lost hope—all recollected with a tone of disappointment.

Robert Hass, in writing of Glück's work, has said,

For the lucky, born into a geography not visited by war or political terror, the events in life that leave the soul scarred and disoriented are death and divorce.

Divorce is a kind of death that Glück has written of in Meadowlands, 1996. She used Odysseus and Penelope as symbolic references in a modern narrative about marital discord and separation. Though Hass admired Meadowlands, Elisabeth Frost wrote disparagingly of the book in her review, "Disharmonies of Desire":

As for Glück's treatment of desire and absence, the bottom line in Meadowlands is that both partners are hopelessly self-absorbed. … In this grim view of modern love, there's little to learn beyond the limits of each speaker's ego.
(The Women's Review of Books, 14:2 (Nov. 1996) p.24)

One might have the same feeling in reading or listening to The Seven Ages.

Wayne Koestenbaum said in introducing Louise Glück, that her pedagogy, creed, and philosophy are spelled out in precise reticence in a mode of declaration. He mentioned that "happiness (if and when it appears in her work) depends on an apprenticeship in misery." Koestenbaum called Glück's poems "artful, stinging, and minimalist" and likened her craft to Mallarmé's. He owned that there is "no energy of show" to them, and he seems quite correct about that. After his effusive and eloquent introduction—adding up to a grandiose non-sequitur—it was difficult for the poet to enter and satisfy her audience. Too much was expected. She entered dressed in black, glued her eyes to the lectern, glasses low on her nose, and read in an edgy voice with repetitive rhythm. The poems were basically autobiographical, but not confessional in their cryptic memoir. Glück has said in "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence:" "…poems are autobiography and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response." This is an honest description of her own work, whether or not the listener or reader is stirred to his or her own response.

After all, The Seven Ambiguities was a book we all read in our college literature classes in the 60's, and Glück's idea that the poet should leave much unsaid to invite the imagination into the vacuum to make its own completion is not a new idea.

Neither is minimalism, but Glück has certainly written many an essay on the subject of writing poetry in a cryptic style, with the aesthetics of paradox and simple language which certainly leaves plenty of silence and more unsaid than said.

I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn't like the windy, dwindling kind. Not surprisingly the sort of sentence I was drawn to, which reflected these tastes and native habit of mind, was paradox, which has the added advantage of nicely rescuing the dogmatic nature from a too moralizing rhetoric.
(From "Proofs and Theories" essay on Poetry in The Education of the Poet, New York: Ecco, 1994.)

Yet, one must own that Glück has many admirers, and one can't but agree with her when she writes in the above mentioned essay that the fundamental experience of the writer:

… is helplessness…most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write, wanting to write differently, not being able to write differently. It is a life dignified…by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement.
Her co-reader, Karl Kirchwey, is a good-natured fellow
who does enjoy a bit of banter and patter between poems.

He reads and writes very precisely, using esoteric language and many Classical Greek and Roman references—as many as nineteenth century English Romantic poets used to. His verses are speckled throughout with words like Euripedes, Dionysis, Pantheus. He translates Goethe and Cavafy and refers to Mozart's biography. Kirchwey is an intellectual poet who demonstrates some wit and plenty of irony, but again, there is a preciousness not meant to engage the larger world of being. There is perhaps more emotional range than in Glück, but this is poetry meant for other poets, perhaps because Mr. Kirchwey was for some years director of the 92nd St. Y's Poetry Center. He read with clarity and intelligence with good interpretive willfulness. One had no difficulty in capturing the poem as it passed, but then it seems the poems passed soon after they were read. "I was an oppressed student in an English boarding school in the Swiss Alps," Kirchway bantered, and one can believe it was so. He is a very learned man who writes pleasantly unexciting poetry, but with defined skill. Ironic wit is his best trait.

Wayne Koestenbaum's introduction of Karl Kirchwey was generously effusive,
but so much so that it, too, added up to overblown non-sequitur.

As I've said earlier, Koestenbaum obviously wanted to please and flatter the poets he introduced, and he wanted to show imtimacy with their work as a good master of ceremonies should, but, though his comments held, at first, some substance and were delivered with care, they were not good launching pads in that they gave the poets too much to live up to.

Was it an enjoyable evening at the Unterberg Poetry Center? Well, let's say it wasn't too painful. It just could have been more vital, but these poets are intelligent readers and they do have something discernible to offer their audience, many of whom may well have enjoyed the evening more than did this reviewer who has by now, at sixty-one, listened to thousands of readings and written hundreds of reviews, only to come away aching for beauty of expression and fullness of life from this one. I wanted to feel exactly like the top of my head had been taken off, but it got pushed down tightly, clamped shut like a lid on all that longing for vibrancy Glück left in me. If her point was to leave me aching for more vitality, she succeeded.

(Daniela Gioseffi is a regular contributor to the magazine. (Masthead) The American Book Award winning author of ten books of poetry and prose, her latest is an e-book of poems titled, Symbiosis, from Rattapallax Press, 2002. Her first book, Eggs in the Lake, from BOA Editons, contained poems which won a New York State Council on the Arts Grant. Subsequent award-winning books were Word Wounds and Water Flowers and Going On from VIA Folios at Purdue university. She reviews for many journals, among them, The Cortland Review, The Hungry Mind Review, American Book Review and The Small Press Review. She's won Poet Lore's prize for literary criticism, and she edits PoetsUSA.com. The Feminist Press will bring out a newly revised edition of her women's studies classic, Women on War: International Voices for the Nuclear Age, in 2002.)