Louise Glück: A Remembrance
Back Row: Barbara Greenberg, Robert Hass, Tobias Wolff, Marita Garin, Faye Kicknosway, Ray Carver, Geoffrey Wolff, Donald Hall, Michael Ryan, Stephen Dobyns. Front Row: Lisel Mueller, Ann Blackmer, Deborah Tall, Jane Shore, Janet Bloom. Heather McHugh, Gloria Still, Linda Nemec Foster, Louise Glück. (@Goddard College, 1979)
Louise Glück taught in the MFA Program for Writers during its initial years at Goddard College (1976-1980) and was on the faculty intermittently during the Program’s first decade at Warren Wilson College. She returned for several anniversary celebrations, one of which –the program’s 20th in 1996– is the source of this reading of “Otis” from Meadowlands (Ecco, 1996).
MFA Program for Writers founder, Ellen Bryant Voigt writes “The loss of Louise Glück is devastating. She was not only an essential personal friend and a great poet, she was a brilliant, passionate teacher, and a crucial friend of The Program. She brought to us an unwavering commitment to rigor as an early member of the faculty and Academic Board at Goddard. She also made the initial contact with Ben & Betty Holden which led to our move to Warren Wilson.”
MFA alum and current faculty member, Sally Ball (poetry ’94) worked with Louise before and during her time in the program. Here’s an excerpt from a remembrance Sally wrote for this forum:
“I was her student at Williams College in Western Massachusetts, working with her for the first time—on my honors thesis, poems, at the hearty and loving urging of Chris Nealon, who knew us both—and she had a reading coming up at the University of New Hampshire, where my younger sister went. I was already Louise’s driver for the short trip between the bus stop in Bennington, VT, and the Williams campus, back and forth each week, and she proposed that I drive her to Durham. Midway across Route 2, I said, “What will you read?” She said new poems, from a new book. This was Ararat, forthcoming the following spring. “What are they like?” I asked. I’d known her for about six weeks. She paused, “Like yours!” she said, elated. “They are a lot like yours!”
In the coming days, the forum will publish Sally’s remembrance. We will also share a moving elegiac essay by faculty member Heather McHugh, who taught with Glück in the MFA Program for Writers at both Goddard and Warren Wilson. From Heather’s essay: “Time was her true quarry (which is to say, timelessness was).”
Finally, for those interested in learning more about Louise Glück’s life and work, in 2020, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise provided this surprisingly revealing and comprehensive autobiography for the Nobel website:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/biographical/
