“Don’t Get Comfortable”: Dana Levin on Louise Glück

Poetry faculty member Dana Levin recently wrote for the Paris Review blog regarding Glück’s recent Nobel Prize. Read an excerpt below:

My friend Mark texted me at 6:18 A.M. yesterday: Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize! All morning, I found myself doing something I hadn’t done much, since the pandemic hit this horrid election year: joyscrolling.

Such recognition for a life in art! That life had changed mine, too: the minute, twenty-two years ago, that Louise plucked my first book manuscript from the submission pile for the APR/Honickman Prize.

One year after that, in 1999, I met her for the first time at a reading in Santa Fe. I tapped her shoulder and introduced myself. She enveloped me in the warmest, beariest hug—it seemed improbable that such a hug could come from so petite a person. Grasping my arms, she leaned back and took me in: “You are not at all what I expected—who would have thought such a sunny personality could write such devastating poems!”

It was a compliment of a high order, and one that troubled me for days. Was there some split between my self in the world and my self on the page? Louise seemed to me to be exactly herself, everywhere: in life and in art. Confounding, difficult task! So few truly accomplish it.

Louise had a mysterious capacity to change her aesthetic approach and still create poems that were unmistakably hers. I asked her about it once, and she said she would give herself little assignments, when she started writing again, after long silence. With Vita Nova, she thought: I never use repetition or questions; thus, every poem has to include one of each. She might not keep them all in every poem as a book developed, but such assignments—simple and formal in nature—propelled her into a new way of sounding exactly like herself.

Read the reflection in its entirety here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/10/09/dont-get-comfortable/