Jackson's Actions

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. --Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) <

I am on a mission—primarily to educate myself more deeply in poetry, and secondarily to overcome my bias concerning academia in all its negative connotations. This is the result of reading the more than wonderful essays of Tony Hoagland in Real Sofistikation which finally opened my closed mind.

When asked, Stephen Dunn, a Pulitzer prize winning poet and notable academic, gave me a short reading list. I am starting with his choices, the first of which was Louise Gluck’s essays, “Proofs & Theories.”



I have read this book twice. The brilliant machinations of Gluck’s mind and the dense prose by which she sets down these insights are difficult to reconcile. I find myself loving and hating her throughout. She would wish that I would read with “no decanting of my personality” but I have not learned to do that yet. In light of her professed preferences for the simple, the non-ornate, the understated, it is infuriating when she gives us overwritten and embellished language for brilliant thoughts that could be simply stated. It is as if she wants to talk in code. But not always. So I am rocked back and forth between uncomfortable concentration and easy understanding. Admittedly I am undereducated, and admittedly the second reading and a conference with my intellectual friend, Carol Peters were helpful in making this material accessible. What made it most accessible, I believe, is the fact that I am now reading Wallace Stevens’ essays, and HE makes Gluck look easy-peasy.

So here is my commentary on her essays. I write all of this for my own sake—to comprehend, to try to grasp the poet and her art. But I also want to share my baby steps in learning with any of you who might be interested. And I would dearly love to hear your comments, corrections, and yea, even arguments on the material. I am SO open to learning, and these are just the ramblings of a student.

I was very taken with the first two essays of the book. “Education of the Poet,” an actual 1989 lecture given by her at the Guggenheim in New York, divulged much of Gluck’s earliest beginnings, her anorexia, psychoanalysis and early, long apprenticeship with Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. She puts forth that the fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness and torment with the writing process. Her own ‘education’ is no different, beset by writer’s block for sometimes years, and a compulsion to better the work, to compete, to change. All feelings that I can understand and empathize with.

The second piece, “On T.S. Eliot” moves us into an essay about one of her favorite poets. She does a bit of literary criticism in discussing the differences between his work and that of the poet, William Carlos Williams (who apparently hated Eliiot’s work). She is clearly in Eliot’s corner and explains his work in ways that enlightened me—that his conversion to Catholicism did not change his work dramatically, that Eliot wanted ‘communion’ and that: “What has driven these poems from the first is terror and need of the understandable other. When the terror becomes unbearable, the other becomes god.” It certainly made me want to re-read Eliot immediately.

At this juncture, I am a big fan of Louise Gluck. I am feeling included in a life I know nothing about, with her brilliant, intellectual mind feeding me new information. What can be better? But then the next essay,

“The Idea of Courage.”

This densely written treatise left me reading and re-reading for meaning. She begins by telling us that “poets have something to gain by giving currency to the idea of courage.” She takes us, in labored ways, through false definitions of courage, trying to arrive at the answer to the question: “If courage informs a poem of personal revelation, what, or who, is the adversary? What is at risk?” Apparently the answer is: the possibility of shame. Then Gluck immediately refutes the very answer she has given.

In fairness to her, perhaps she or her students have felt shame about writing about their lives. And perhaps someone has said “that is a courageous poem” because of it. And perhaps this is what Gluck is trying to address and refute. But it is an approach to the issue that is wholly confusing until one has pieced together her intent.

She maintains, then, that: “The act of composition remains, for the poet, an act, or condition, of ecstatic detachment.” (italics, mine). i.e. if one is ecstatic and detached, one does not require courage. “ . . . personal circumstances may prompt art, but the making of art is a revenge on circumstance.” Thus the poet gets the last ecstatic word. And she adds that even with “critical assault upon a finished work, the ostensibly exposed self, the author, is, by the time of publication, out of range, out of existence, in fact.” She contends that poets act less in a state of courage than a state of grace.” This seemed a very forced and manipulated exercise to me. Let me lay this out as a syllogism (from my days of Logic 101):
Premise One: Poets have something to gain by giving currency to the idea of courage.
Premise Two: The valid implication of a poet’s courage is the possibility of shame.
Conclusion: There is no shame, therefore there is no courage.

Huh, could you give me that again?

“On George Oppen”

This essay praising George Oppen’s restrained and precise art is very short and telling of Gluck’s own reticence to praise, and of her love of the unspoken, the coaxed and implied instead of the explicit. It might too explain why her essays get more and more inaccessible as I read.

“Against Sincerity”

This was, I think, one of the most important essays in the book. I had to have a friend help me through it on first reading. But on subsequent readings, it became not only apparent to me, but seemed to be one of the most significant and helpful lessons. While most poets and writers know that “real life” and “art” are not supposed to be identical, the nuance and importance of the vast differences are not easily conveyed. Gluck uses examples from Keats and Milton, and spends thirteen pages on the distinctions.

Actuality = the world of event
Truth = the illumination or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art
Honesty or Sincerity=”telling the truth” which is not necessarily the path to illumination.

Simply put, the events in actual life (which are the material for poems) should not be recorded “honestly” or with “sincerity” (Gluck’s words), but must be translated into art with the “truth” of illumination and discovery. Thus the title “Against Sincerity.”

I treasure my poet friends. I go to them for clarification when I’m uncertain. My intelligent friend, Carol Peters, always helpful, supplied me with these clear explanations.

Gluck: "The artist's task, then, involves the transformation of the actual to the true.”

Peters explanation: For example, an actual fact—a man hits a child once.

The artist sees the man hitting the child again and again. Every time she closes her eyes she sees the man hitting the child. The repetition of hitting is not actual, but is absolutely true for the artist that she will never get over seeing the man hit the child. She transforms this (her true response to an actual fact) into art.

Gluck: And the ability to achieve such transformation, especially in art that presumes to be subjective, depends on conscious willingness to distinguish truth from honesty or sincerity.

Peters’ explanation: "art that presumes to be subjective" -- i don't know any other kind of art. subjective means to me "interpreted," "sensed through my lenses, my apparatus" -- I can't see a thing without interpreting it, both in a physical and an emotional sense

"conscious willingness to distinguish truth from honesty to sincerity" -- truth is a piece of art that attempts to convey the artist's enduring pain of that violence while ‘honesty and sincerity’ is that the man hit the child only once.

Gluck: The impulse, however, is not to distinguish but to link.

Peters’ explanation: to link (in an honest or sincere way) would be to write a poem like this:

The man hit the child once
but for me it is as if
the man is hitting the child
again and again until I cannot
think of anything else --
the pain overwhelms me.


to distinguish (to make a thing of distinction? to move beyond the mere facts to the emotional honesty and sincerity of the facts) would be to write a poem like this:

from her cheek
red rises, feathers
flared but kept
from flying

-------------------------
I thank Carol Peters for her explanations which I think makes Gluck extraordinarily clear.



“On Hugh Seidman”

Another small praise-essay is on a poet who, like George Oppen, writes in an austere and terse style which Gluck admires. This poet, published first by Kunitz, expresses deep pain, and oddly, I detected Gluck’s own pain in her admiration of his work. I bought a current book of Seidman’s poems which I shall report on later.


“The Forbidden”

This is the essay that probably should have been omitted from the book. Dark truths are ostensibly the subject. Gluck would have us believe that there is a right and wrong way to write poetry about verboten subjects like child abuse and incest. But this reader is at a loss to uncover her lesson, and sees instead a mere preference for one poet’s dark work over another’s. The only constructive criticism I can glean is in this:

“ . . . when ambivalence toward self is missing, the written recreation, no matter how artful, forfeits emotional authority . . . the test for emotional authority is emotional impact . . . “

and Gluck proceeds to tell us in very barbed and unnecessary ways that Linda McCarriston’s Eva-Mary and Sharon Olds’ The Father are both utterly inadequate books. She goes so far to call Olds’ book unintentionally static, and McCarriston’s has fixed attitudes. To contrast her dislike of these two books, she praises Forche’s The Country Between Us and Bidart’s Confessional. The snippets she uses for examples of the latter are indeed interesting. Inspiring. But then, no, she must come back again to attack McCarriston and Olds in her conclusion:

“ . . . The problem in both Eva-Mary and The Father isn’t the refusal of the tragic vision but the failure of both authors to find alternative visions. Eva-Mary is limited by McCarriston’s managerial interventions, her insistence on a single rigid interpretation; limited in a sense, by excess will. Whereas The Father suffers from an insufficiency of will or direction; the poems are nearly all better in their parts than as wholes, as is the collection. The aimlessness of the book itself suggests the single disadvantage of Olds’ impressive facility: these poems read as great talent with, at the moment, nowhere to go. Neither of these conditions need determine these poets’ futures.(italics mine) But I find myself concerned that, in their different ways, McCarriston and Olds are constrained by a like mechanism, the felt obligation of the woman writer to give encouraging voice to the life force (for want of a better term.)

This just flat out makes me ANGRY. Until Ms. Gluck, she of such advantaged and nurtured childhood, has experienced INCEST and all of its attendant psychological baggage, I think she might learn to direct her literary criticism in avenues where she can create some light instead of closing down fellow poets into even darker shadows. Frankly, I think such emotional material probably makes Ms. Gluck uncomfortable and she finds it necessary to simply bad mouth that which makes her squirm. Surely I learned nothing in this essay other than her smallness. And the arrogance of “neither of these conditions need determine these poets’ futures” makes for its own Freudian free-for-all as to the ambitious and bitchy nature of Ms. Gluck.

Interesting that in my recent workshop with Dorianne Laux, I apologized for an “abuse” poem that came out during one of our exercises. I said I was so tired of writing such poetry. Dorianne exploded into a tirade: “Don’t ever stop writing such poetry! They don’t want you to write this poetry. They don’t want to read it. You can count the books on Viet Nam on one hand! There should be many more books on Viet Nam. And don’t ever, ever stop writing your truth just because they don’t want to read it.”

At the time I mused on who “they,” the enemy camp, might be. Little did I know, Pogo, it is us.


“Obstinate Humanity”

This next essay is interesting because Gluck takes two giant poets, Milosz and Hass, to task for their ‘eloquent’ chastisement of a third giant, Robinson Jeffers--on the issue of humanity. She comes out softly on the side of Jeffers. It spurs someone like me to read more of their work. I thought she had a most insightful point of view.

“Disruption, Hesitation, Silence”

Gluck is a huge fan of “less” rather than “more”—she is attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent deliberate silence. (this also harkens back to her childhood where she writes: “ . . . the child I was, unwilling to speak if to speak meant to repeat myself.”) It also supports her earlier essay about actuality and truth, because the overlong poems often give us much “honesty and sincerity” and little artful truth. (See “Against Sincerity”) She explores Rilke and Berryman, and again resurrects Oppen’s simplicity in contrast to Berryman—and her analysis of their styles is wonderfully brilliant and fun to read. She pleads the case for economy in language because it promotes depth. Again, she brings in Eliot (and Prufrock) where she says “Eliot has written the masterpiece of avoidance. At the poem’s center is the unsaid, the overwhelming question, the moment forced to its crisis. But Prufrock is not Lazarus; he does not tell all.” This is a cautionary tale for poets and an excellent essay, I think.

“Disinterestedness”

Three dense pages which pack a wallop if you can make it out. (Talk about less rather than more!) One needs a decoder ring for much of Gluck’s prose. What I glean from this essay (and I must admit that the information smarts a bit) is that readers put too much of themselves onto the page while they are reading. Gluck’s ideal would be that disinterestedness—reading as though one had no personality—would be far more rewarding. The effort to suspend opinion and response, attempting instead neutrality, attentiveness would be a win. “By refusing, even for the moment, to subordinate itself, the self triumphs.” I presume this is a plea for objectivity, for fairness—and she acknowledges the argument that it would take a ruse of disinterest and the loss might be that rush of no division between self and the work.

I admit to opinion and response in every word. Alas.

“The Best American Poetry 1993: Introduction”

The inclusion of this actual introduction to a 1993 BAP is odd. Especially since the intro mainly reiterates Gluck’s views (expressed in other essays) and her seeming reluctance to participate in the chore of reading all magazine offerings for a year, so she rambles. One gets the feeling that she wishes to be elsewhere. In an effort at reconciliation, she concludes: “Still, among the multiple interesting poems, the poems dull to me or inaccessible to me, the poems that were echoes of other poems, the poems of startling promise, there were voices that, in my reading, stood out, like the voice at the dinner table whose next sentence you strain to hear, and some of these may be the enduring ones, the voices time can’t force life from.”

The names of these blessed few? They remain forever the famous Gluck ‘unsaid.’

“The Dreamer and The Watcher”

This essay is commentary about Gluck’s 1981 poem “Night Song.” I am unable to find the poem on the Internet (and I do not know it) and will have to research where it is published. I found a 1980 piece called “Night Piece” in the Amazon index of a collection of her first four books, but I imagine she would provide the correct title here.

Gluck says: “For me, all poems being in some fragment of motivating language—the task of writing a poem is the search for context.” Then she quickly adds, (always differentiating herself from others,) “Other imaginations begin, I believe, in the actual, in the world, in some concrete thing which examination endows with significance.” And in her customary trashing of other people’s processes, even the ‘generalized,’ she adds: “That process is generative: its proliferating associations produce a broad, lush, inclusive and, at times, playful poetry; its failures seem simply diffuse, without focus. My own work begins at the opposite end, at the end, literally, at illumination, which has then to be traced back to some source in the world.”

In fairness, I need to hold this essay for future re-reading after I have my hands on her poem. I am most curious about it, since it compelled her to write an entire essay on its genesis.

“On Stanley Kunitz”

A thoroughly charming tribute to her beloved former teacher. When she was in her 20’s, this happened. A little anecdote about him, after their study was finished, rejecting her poems as “awful” but knighting her by saying that “this doesn’t matter, that you are a poet.”

“Invitation and Exclusion”

As a student, I found this essay one of the most engaging as we get Gluck’s brilliant analysis of Eliot and Plath’s poetry, as well as that of Wallace Stevens and Dickinson. She writes from the premise of whether the work invites the reader in, or shuts the door on him. Not really about accessibility of the material, but the tone and intent of inclusion by the poet. Eliot is one for connecting. Stevens and Plath exclude with utter disregard. It’s a fascinating way of looking at the work, and in the commentary, I found much to love about Gluck’s incisive calculations.
The whole thrust of the essay seemed to somehow fly against Gluck’s own intentions however, so it is a bit of a puzzle. One would come away logically thinking she would like to invite us into her work, but that has not been my total experience, even in her prose.

“Death and Absence”

A confusing and unfocused (as she admits) essay about two early poems, her sister’s death, and yet the ending of this short piece makes it worthwhile:

“I thought once poems were like words inscribed in rock or caught in amber. I thought in these terms so long, so fervently, with such investment in images of preservation and fixity, that the inaccuracies of the metaphor as description of my own experience did not occur to me until very recently. What is left out of these images is the idea of contact, and contact, of the most intimate sort, is what poetry can accomplish. Poems do not endure as objects but as presences. When you read anything worth remembering, you liberate a human voice; you release into the world again a companion spirit. I read poems to hear that voice. And I write to speak to those I have heard.

Which is to say that Gluck writes to poets of her own standing, I think—and to none other. Just as she once wrote for her mother and Kunitz.

“On Impoverishment”

This is the Baccalaureate address, Williams College, 1993. An odd address, indeed, it warns the newly graduated of the desolation in life, most especially between successes. Ha. I would expect nothing less of the mysterious Ms. Gluck. It ends on a better note however: “Realize, then, that impoverishment is also a teacher, unique in its capacity to renew, and that its yield, when it ends, is a passionate openness which in turn re-invests the world with meaning.”

Biography

Louise Gluck teaches at Williams College and lives in Vermont with her husband and son. The author of six books of poems and the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award and William Carlos Williams Award. In 1993 she received the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Wild Iris.


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