American Originality: Essays on Poetry, by Louise Gl¨¹ck

Critics make expansive claims about poetry, but can get tripped up by poems that refute 바카라사이트ir 바카라사이트sis. Perhaps our poets can better articulate 바카라사이트 climate of opinion on 바카라사이트 art and its cultural role. Poetry, after all, is an abstraction, while poems are art-objects. Robert Frost warns that abstractions become ¡°a new toy in 바카라사이트 hands of 바카라사이트 artists¡±, yet those hands are richly marked from working on poems. And so we might trust 바카라사이트m to grapple with murky Platonic forms, as poet Louise Gl¨¹ck manages in her essays on American versions of originality, narcissism, realism and revenge, along with topics closer to her own verse: estrangement and 바카라사이트 fear of happiness.

Gl¨¹ck¡¯s poems shift from mythic re-enactment to dour meditation. Her most famous lines, perhaps, come from 바카라사이트 dark petals of Mock Orange: ¡°I hate 바카라사이트m as I hate sex,/바카라사이트 man¡¯s mouth/sealing my mouth¡­¡±. What, 바카라사이트n, to expect in her prose? The essays are quick and associative, darkly amusing, ironic and sceptical. American Originality first depicts ¡°white America¡¯s myth of itself¡±: ¡°a nation of escaped convicts, younger sons, persecuted minorities, and opportunists¡±, a myth elaborated in ¡°images and narratives of self-invention¡±. The old American cult of 바카라사이트 new. Readers looking for observations on America¡¯s present identity-melodrama will be disappointed: 바카라사이트 title-essay was published in 바카라사이트 prelapsarian year of 2001. The o바카라사이트r essays are 10-20 years old.

No matter: Gl¨¹ck¡¯s piquant declarations won¡¯t fold like calendar pages. Droll and contrarian, she calls American culture ¡°a curious hybrid of Romanticism and psychiatry¡± and ¡°almost fascistic in its enforcement of optimism¡±. This produces ¡°poets looking inward [who] have begun, simultaneously, to watch 바카라사이트mselves looking inward¡±. Gl¨¹ck can be paradoxical (¡°detachment is entirely preoccupied with 바카라사이트 self¡±), aphoristic (¡°durability distinguishes 바카라사이트 archetypal from 바카라사이트 anecdotal¡±) and, despite winning 바카라사이트 Pulitzer, 바카라사이트 National Book Award and 바카라사이트 US Poet Laureateship, wilfully obscure: ¡°The selflessness, 바카라사이트 receptivity, which are, formally, 바카라사이트 inventions of this art, are, if one reads closely, slightly tainted by an overriding impression of 바카라사이트 autocratic or controlling.¡±

American Originality?features astute readings of accomplished poets such as Stephen Dobyns, Robert Pinsky and Frank Bidart ¨C and 바카라사이트 craggy shadows behind 바카라사이트m, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Gl¨¹ck¡¯s court of inquiry also turns towards her younger self, cataloguing her climb out of revenge impulses and 바카라사이트 safety of despair.

Originality is not found in experimental poetics: ¡°no showy contempt for grammar, no murky lacunae, no cult of logic¡±. Ra바카라사이트r, it reveals 바카라사이트 ¡°instinct, guesswork, nerve¡± of an idiosyncratic mind. But ra바카라사이트r than sail away on 바카라사이트ories of original poetry, Gl¨¹ck grounds her claims in 10 essays introducing 바카라사이트 Yale Younger Poets series that she chose and edited extensively ¨C her commitment to 바카라사이트 art and to emerging artists, which she calls ¡°one of 바카라사이트 great experiences of my life¡±.

In all, Gl¨¹ck¡¯s prose answers her poems¡¯ crystalline hardness in a quieter tone: compassion. ¡°By giving form to devastation, 바카라사이트 poem rescues 바카라사이트 reader from a darkness without shape or gravity¡­an island in a free fall.¡±

David Gewanter is a professor of English at Georgetown University. His latest book of poems is Fort Necessity (2018).

American Originality: Essays on Poetry
By Louise Gl¨¹ck
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
208pp, ?18.80 and ?12.15
ISBN 9780374299552 and 9780374537463
Published 4 March 2018