Sherry Chandler » Louise Glück
Louise Glück
Louise Glück is a small woman. Short and thin. Somehow I had not expected that.
She wore a black long-sleeved top that covered her right shoulder but bared the left shoulder and arm to the top of the bicep. Her collarbone is long and fine. She wore black trousers with a slight bell that covered all but the toe of her tight-fitted black boots. When, occasionally during the reading, she would stretch her left leg out behind her and rest her foot on the toe, the line looked like a snippet of a James Thurber drawing.
She read in an aggressively quiet voice. It forced you to listen hard — even though she was wearing one of those clip-on microphones. She read long poems in her quiet voice. It was almost as though she were challenging the listener. Or spurning (though she was not haughty). The room stayed very quiet.
Questioned about this, she answered, “I do not read loudly.”
“Reading is a terrible brutal constriction of the work,” she said, and she is not comfortable reading. The high flush on her cheeks attested to her truth. “The page can do so much more than can the voice.” Reading a poem aloud adds an element of time, “a chronology,” but on the page a poem is more like a web. “No reader can do for the poem what the page can do.” And again, “I fear accomplishing with my person what the words on the page can do.”
And yet, in her reading, I noticed interconnections between the poems, all from Averno, that I had not noticed when I read them in the book.
Questioned about the darkness of one of her lines, a line that speaks of hope that defies perception, she quipped “And I’m still alive.”
[Added: I suppose I should mention that I saw Louise Glück at the University of Louisville as part of their Axton Reading Series. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me to mention this event on the blog. I've been very solipsistic lately.]
Possibly related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
4 Comments
1. shamash replies at 31st March 2007, 1:17 am :
I wish I could have been there! Reading your lovely discription makes me feel as if I were there. Thanks for the post!
2. sherry replies at 31st March 2007, 7:59 am :
I wish you had been there too, Shamash. I’d love to meet you some day.
3. Robert replies at 8th April 2007, 1:31 am :
Thanks for this. Fascinating that Glück prefers the poem on the page to the poem aloud. While it makes sense given her mastery with line breaks, it is surprisingly rare to hear a poet favor print to voice.
4. sherry replies at 9th April 2007, 4:34 pm :
My pleasure, Robert. And indeed, it was a pleasure to hear and see Glück, a difficult pleasure. I was scribbling notes as she spoke so I may not have got the quotations word-for-word pefect but that is certainly the gist of what she said. I was surprised. As you say, most poets nowadays seem to consider poetry a spoken art.
Leave a comment