On Oct. 8, Louise Gluck won the Nobel Prize in literature. In its announcement, the Nobel Prize Committee lauded “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Gluck, born in New York City in 1943, joins Bob Dylan and T.S. Eliot as the only American poets to win the prize and becomes the first female American poet to win it.
Gluck’s win is a reprieve from years of Nobel Prize controversy. When Dylan won in 2016, some groused he was a lyricist, not a poet. In 2018, a sexual assault scandal rocked the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize. In the aftermath, the academy vowed to depart from a “male-oriented,” “Eurocentric” perspective. People expected the 2019 Nobel Prize to go to a woman. Instead, it went to Austrian novelist Peter Handke, a man notorious for making flippant remarks about the Bosnian genocide.
This year, everyone seems to agree that Gluck deserves the prize. The response from the poetry world has been jubilant. After half a century of writing, teaching, and publishing, Gluck has reached the summit of poetry fame, approaching the status of Robert Frost and Marianne Moore. But poetry fame is distinct from actual fame. The general public knows little of her work.
People, including the authors of the Nobel Prize announcement, often use the word “austere” to characterize Gluck’s poetry. And it’s true enough: Her work is notable for its sparse vocabulary, its razor focus, and its almost suffocating sense of control. Gluck writes about trauma, classical myth, and the futility of love — and whatever she’s writing about, she remains sharply conscious of mortality.
From her parents she learned erudition and sharpness. When Gluck was a girl, her mother, Beatrice, read her classical myths before bed, planting seeds that would germinate in books like The Triumph of Achilles (1985) and The Wild Iris (1992). Her father, Daniel Gluck, nursed literary ambitions, but he laid them aside to enter the world of business. Today he is known for co-inventing the X-Acto knife.
Gluck fought anorexia throughout her youth. When she was a teenager, it nearly killed her. In a later poem, she would write:
Death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.
Scribbler from the jump, Gluck took poetry classes at Sarah Lawrence College and at Columbia University, where she met poet Stanley Kunitz who would become a valuable mentor. She published her first book, Firstborn, in 1968. Reviewers liked it. The book was full of taut, splenetic images, as in the book’s first poem in which the speaker sees a child taking a nap on his mother’s lap: “I saw her pulsing crotch … the lice rooted in that baby’s hair.” Another poem counsels, “Love, you ever want me, don’t.”
After Firstborn, Gluck experienced a nasty case of writer’s block that lasted for two years. In 1971, she began teaching at Goddard College, and her return to an active life made her want to write again. In 1975, she published The House on Marshland. The poems in it were clearer and sharper, approaching the simplicity that would make her famous.
After an acrimonious divorce, Gluck published The Triumph of Achilles in 1985. The opening poem, “Mock Orange,” was a shot heard round the wee world of poetry:
It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—
and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union….
You can hear the language hardening to blunt edges (“I hate them. / I hate them as I hate sex”), sharpening to blades (“the low, humiliating / premise of union”), and understand why her poems created a stir. To paraphrase Richard Burt, few poets can make their alienation so aesthetically interesting.
By the 1980s, Gluck was well respected. In the ‘90s, she began to stack up awards. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, an interrelated sequence of poems rooted in the book of Genesis. In it, flowers speak, trees sing, and God is mute. Gluck’s lines had taken on a certain swagger:
I cannot go on
restricting myself to images
because you think it is your right
to dispute my meaning:
I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you.
Her run of success continued with Meadowlands (1996), another book about the failures of love. Critics praised Gluck’s attention to the hairline cracks in marriage and her facility with dark humor: “I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean / your cold feet all over my dick.” She had achieved a painful verisimilitude in her poems. Many readers did not hesitate to read her work as an account of her actual life, aligning her with “confessional” poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.
Though her poems deal with subjective suffering, they are not, according to most critics, “confessional.” The “I” in her poems is not always Gluck. Sometimes “I” is a flower. Sometimes, it is the captain of a pirate ship. Sometimes “we” is a collection of flowers addressing the poet as a mocking chorus: “What are you saying? That you want / eternal life? Are your thoughts really / as compelling as all that?”
It is perhaps strange that such an acerbic poet, of whom the critic William Logan once said, “There’s no poet quite so in love with her own pain,” should be so loved in America. We like our artists garish and self-promoting. We like our Kanyes, our Beyonces, our Walt Whitmans. But the power and influence of Gluck’s verse rest in its simplicity. In that sense, she is “accessible,” though she cringes at the word. She would rather write for the elect.
Gluck is, in the jargon of pop music, a crossover star. She appeals to the general reader with plain syntax and brute honesty while commanding the respect of the literati with her detachment, her iron grip on the slippery art of free verse, and her deep understanding of Greek myth.
She has also mastered the public persona of the poet. When fellow writer Mary Karr said that if she had a choice between being happy and being a writer, she would choose happiness, Gluck responded, “Don’t worry, you don’t have a choice.” When informed that she had won the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature, Gluck said, “I don’t know, really, what it means,” and, “I really have to have some coffee.”
Now this lovable curmudgeon has won the Nobel Prize, and despite her constant meditations on death, she has claimed a sliver of immortality.
Forester McClatchey is a poet from Atlanta, Georgia. His work appears in Pleiades, Oxford Poetry, and the Iowa Review, among other journals.
