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.
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Ambling back from the bottle dump I glimpse my neighbor, busy Under a honeysuckle’s winter thatch. Summer in February, we agree— But should we rejoice or be scared? She’s picking the grey-green leaves From a sheaf of dried verbena, Replenishing her tin of bedtime teas: Verbena leaves that weigh next to nothing.
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One needs to be a little lost to find it on a Dutchess County knoll. Building 85 still stands. Look it up. Or better, go yourself. Its lower story windows broken, boarded, but the other thirteen floors appear intact enough to taunt the empty village outside its gates with State employment. Our lives, that “campus” and my journeying, have crossed: first as a child, and later as a doctor who made some kinds of work done there my habit, my profession, and today, when heading home from Danbury in the snow, with no one quite expecting me. I turned off at Wingdale, followed ditches lined with cow vetch dropping on the downside of a sudden rise. There: bakery, laundry, low-slung dorms, brick housing for unlicensed pharmacists, a minor stadium, and, hidden in the trees, burial ground with rotting gate and lettered arch— patients abandoned to the place—every inch dissolving, stripped of flashing, grizzling with mineral ooze.
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Mel and Sol must have recognized one another from the start.
Chemicals—bio-signals?—telegraphed; moved them toward one another in ancient, primal ways. Scarlet wished to God she could cheer for the sermon on the mount. Easy to say I am glad you are happy. Harder by far, it seemed, to cheer the apparatus of happiness. She drew up bluejeaned legs, hugged her knees.
Mel insisted she was happy. Scarlet didn’t buy it. Some fat lie lay coiled like a python in the engine room of that story. From the beginning Mel endured Sol’s vanities, his dogma, his pronouncements, though much of it whipped her bloody. His laying down of absolutes. I don’t have affairs, I have relationships. On and on he talked about how he loved his wife, the golden angel Winnie. Never dreaming it might pain the mistress at his knee every Saturday, who smiled whilst his words stabbed her in the head, over and over. Smiled as she bade him goodbye, softly shutting the door. Then the smile fell off. Scarlet knew this from years of e-mail, before Mel stopped reporting. Once Mel had actually slipped into a clarinet concert of Winnie’s, come home, and wept. She would never, never allow him to know.
What was Scarlet to do?
Witness.
Cheer.
Cheer when she could.
…
Sol had everything. Authority, wisdom, money. Devoted slave-wife. Adoring female
students. Perfect control. Except, Mel said, his grown children were having trouble. Stumbling in the world. Surprise surprise, thought Scarlet bitterly. Sol’s response to his children’s trouble, according to Mel, was characteristic. He would swoop in on them—drove up to their homes announced, wifey Winnie alongside him in the car like Robin to his Batman. Squared off theatrically with his kids and their spouses, confronting them with some sort of moral reprimand or ultimatum—until someone fled the room in anger or tears. Then he took his wife by the arm and drove off, head erect. Or he withheld his visits, a royal withdrawal. Wrote long letters instead, detailing his philosophy of life in many single-spaced pages. His wife’s responses to the children’s distress? Sol doesn’t say. Winifred Armantino, from what Mel had gathered, was reared in North Dakota. Lines of demarcation were clear: Husband king. Head never higher than his, Mel had once murmured, a line from The King and I, making Scarlet laugh at the time.
Winnie claimed an art of her own. This, it was gathered, somehow saved and excused her.
Clarinet with the city symphony, later a wind ensemble called Scarborough Faire.
Sol had confided to Mel that his wife did not understand the music she played as well as he did, though course he’d never suggested that to her, and though he himself did not read musical notation. It was the music’s spiritual core he understood, saw into, far more deeply.
As she aged, Winnie stopped her public performances, giving private lessons. Then those, too, fell away. She puttered now, saw to the household—a villa on a hill, overlooking a pear orchard. Perhaps she even cleaned the villa herself, though Mel doubted that. They had money.
Winnie’s great task was to minister to Sol. She would burst into his home office when she wished to show him something that delighted her—an ad for a yogurt maker, or a new diet. He always let Winnie interrupt him, he repeatedly told Mel, because her heart was so innocent. Once he’d upbraided his wife, he admitted, about an improperly baked potato from the microwave. This was an image Mel never, ever forgot—nor, on hearing it, did Scarlet, silently thanking God Mel had been spared marriage to this man. Always, Sol praised Winnie to Mel. Hours of praise, months, years of it. Elaborate descriptions, soaked in amused affection. Diets, gardening, a program she’d seen on television. More diets. Cabbage soup, grapefruit, lemon and honey. He told Mel many times how much weight Winnie had lost. Mel listened, smiling. She herself had always gained weight effortlessly, fought food cravings all her life, and now, exacerbated by chemo and countless medications, had grown wide, doughy, puffy.
Scarlet though it stunning that a gifted man could behave this way. Sol appeared to have no glimmer he was cutting his lover to internal ribbons with adoring reports of his wife’s weight losses. Year after year Sol marveled over his beloved Winnie, chuckled aloud at her endearing foibles. Mel listened with luminous eyes; asked fond questions. Chuckled with him at his wife’s childlike qualities, at the purity of her heart.
When Sol went home Mel fell into bed.
Scarlet rubbed her hands against the tops of her thighs.
Mel wants it this way.
Wants?
Accepts. And why, cannot matter. Not to you, not anymore. And not out loud.
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Dilruba Ahmed, a 2009 poetry alum, recently had a poem featured on The Slowdown, an American Public Media podcast. Read an excerpt of “Bring Now the Angels” below:
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But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance . . . Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water— endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R? —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
ABDUCTION
The act of being taken. Away, perhaps.
In Greek mythology, abduction precedes violation. For example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woman after woman is removed from a place of safety and transported elsewhere for violation, by ship or chariot, sea or land, or the ethereal machinations of the gods. Blossoms and baskets are dropped by these maidens, life interrupted.
The Metamorphoses are tales of violence and resulting human change: to trees, to animals, to birds. When I read these tales as a young woman, I imagined transformation as both punishment and safety. When the gods shape-shifted a person from human to nonhuman, it might be punishment; however, that transformation made further violence less likely.
In fact, on the cover of my college edition of Metamorphoses, a Duchamp-like figure of a woman, geometrical, transitions to a tree with roots as feet and leaves as a bower of curled hair. She has become impenetrable.
I thought of the myths as having a sequence:
1. Abduction 2. Sexual violation 3. Transformation
Sequences radiate clarity. They can be interrupted, or, perhaps reversed. I’m comforted by these mathematics.
Alphabets have sequence, too; however, language itself isn’t constrained by its origin in order. Words are formed by disorder, and translation reorders that disorder further. The Greek verb viasmós collapses the concepts of abduction and violation, as does the Latin verb rapto. It doesn’t matter if English separates them.
Word, body, mind. I can separate these pieces of experience, aligning them with abduction, violation, transformation. But when I open the cover of Metamorphoses, on its heavy paper backing is inscribed a room number with the name of the dorm I lived in the second semester of my junior year.
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Mel and Sol must have recognized one another from the start. 
