READING THE POEMS OF LOUISE GLUCK

robert motherwell

Today I gave myself a rare treat, one I did not know was necessary until it happened. It's been so relentlessly cold the last few days and nights, I needed to be warm, relaxed and warm. My neighbors who are away right now have a house across the road. I needed some time to sit back with a book in a warm house and I wanted a hot bath. Put clothes in the washing machine and ran the bath water as hot as I could take it, filled the tub as high as it would go without overflowing when I sat down, remembering I displace more water now than in the past. I'd pre-heated the house, making it comfortable. The floor was warm enough to walk barefoot. It would not do to take a hot bath in a cold room with a cold floor. Today I was taking a time-out from the cold. I sat down in the tub and the water rose appreciably. Feet were glowing warm in a short time, blood circulation. Warm feet was the greatest blessing of all. It felt like sitting in a sauna, the heat even all over. Almost nodded off a few times. I wanted to stay in the water on and on, but it started cooling down after a good while. I was surprised at how well the tub held the water's heat. I started getting restless. Dried off, dressed and went to the living room, sat on a warm sofa and picked up the book I'd brought to spend some time in the warm with, Louise Gluck's, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck requires close attention, focus, from word to word. She's a tight, compact poet who uses every word deliberately. Maybe I read a dozen poems, each of them half a dozen times, reading them over and over until I felt the flow of the language and followed the progression freely. From one of several poems titled Matins:

 

                          are you like the hawthorn tree,

          always the same thing in the same place,

          or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up

          a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,

          and the next year, purple in the rose garden?

 

louise gluck

 

I lay back on the sofa reading, bare feet up enjoying the warm air, mind enjoying the verse of Louise Gluck. I bought her first book in the late 1960s, Firstborn. She was not what you'd call a Sixties poet. Pop culture was not her ambition. She received quite a lot of positive attention, a Young American Poet of the moment. I liked her concise style with language. A quarter century later I found another of her books, Ararat, which I loved. In one of the poems I read today she wrote of standing before a window speaking to her other self reflected in the glass. The poem was one part of self talking to the other part of self. Her poems are often addressed to the other known as you. Sometimes you is another person, loosely identified, and sometimes you is another part of herself, like the mirror image self. Bob Dylan uses the device of you for another person and another part of self. I've thought several Bob Dylan songs conversations with himself. Sometimes with Dylan and with Gluck, you is both other and self at once. Her poems have a presence for me, such that each one is like a painting. Each one is uniquely itself like abstractions by Robert Motherwell. The poems are intimately personal, subjective, without being confessional. I read the poems over and over, went from last line to first and through it again, each time feeling the relationship of the words with each other, seeing it new each time, sometimes slightly new and sometimes radically new. From first reading to last I am in search of the poem Louise Gluck wrote. In some ways, I'd say she'd be a very difficult poet to translate into another language. The clarity of her word usage would be sublime for a translator, but then you get into the subtle nuances and it kinda gets past word meanings.

 

robert motherwell

 

I spent two hours with maybe a dozen poems. I wasn't explicating them or trying to figure them out. I was reading them looking for their feeling, images, what she was saying. The academic way I learned to read poetry was a good education, but I don't read like that anymore. I like to read a poem as a work of art to be taken on sight like a painting on a wall in a show. I like to read it for the story it is. I like to read a poem with the same eye that I watch a movie. Gluck's stories are not ones with beginning, middle and end, nor are they dramas. They are quiet observation. Each poem is a smooth ride through her thinking process. I like the quiet her poems ease into my mind. The lines pull me through the poems not by drama, but by the progression in the poem, riding its rhythm. I feel like she has a fine feeling for rhythm. Her rhythm is walking rhythm. I even feel like her poems are brief Pinter plays. I'll put here a full poem to give an idea of how she writes a complete poem. This is not to say all her poems are shaped like this one. Some have long lines and short stanzas. The poem itself determines it's physical expression on the page.

 

          SCILLA, by Louise Gluck

 

          Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we---waves

          of sky blue like

          a critique of heaven: why

          do you treasure your voice

          when to be one thing

          is to be next to nothing?

          Why do you look up? To hear

          an echo like the voice

          of god? You are all the same to us,

          solitary, standing above us, planning

          your silly lives: you go

          where you are sent, like all things,

          where the wind plants you,

          one or another of you forever

          looking down and seeing some image

          of water, and hearing what? Waves,

          and over waves, birds singing.

 

robert motherwell

 

The buzzer on the dryer was my signal to wrap it up, fold the laundry and return home. It felt like I had just begun with Louise Gluck's poems. I could have sat with her hours more. And will. It's my book. I brought it home. Hers are internal journeys. I follow the lead of the words to see where they go, a winding trail that is never predictable. It's like driving Glade Valley Road; surprise turns left or right, the steering wheel always in motion. Attempting to drive the road too fast it becomes a struggle. Settling into it at 30 and 35 mph, it's a smooth flow going with the hills and curves. Louise Gluck's poems are a struggle to keep up with in a hurry, but slow down to the rate of flow in the poem and it becomes an easy, lilting flow something like following the dog, walking a deer trail through the woods. I come out of a round with her poems with my head feeling as clear as during a walk among the trees. It was a good cleansing today, body, mind and soul.  

 

robert motherwell

 

 

 

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GOOD READS

It is a time in the life of looking back over the life as a unit in time, a series of chapters, each one leading to the next. It just now occurred to me for the first time that I could divide it up into chapters and give each chapter a name. That could be very interesting in terms of interior examination. This one I'm in now I could not have foreseen, nor any of them. Each chapter followed the one before in the continuum. Russian writer Anton Chekhov wrote a short story, My Life, that is an allegorical summary of his life as a housepainter instead of playwright. I find I'm in a time of the life when I want to reread certain books. Chekhov is one. Patrick White another. Tolstoy another. The Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, Joyce's Ulysses, John Berryman's poems, Robinson Jeffers' poems, Elizabeth Bishop's poems.. A lot of the books I've read have been special friends. I like being able to see my books. The spine in the bookshelf with the title and author on it is a reminder to me of what I found inside it. The world has so many really good writers, it doesn't do to even try to  know who they are, let alone read them all. I'd like to read Camus again, everything. And Wallace Stevens again. Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled again. There are so many.

I've enjoyed so many books so incredibly much that I look back over some of the titles happy to have made the acquaintance of whoever it is. Chinese dissident writer Xao Xingjian gives an in-depth look into living under the Chinese bureaucratic system that penetrates everywhere, and the brooding dark cloud that covers the entire land. Mo Yan's Red Sorghum tells the story of the Japanese invasion of Nanking before ww2. The devastation was so intensely cruel it is still an issue of contention between China and Japan. At the moment I'm reading NASCAR Legends by Robert Edelstein. He also wrote Full Throttle, the story of legendary NASCAR driver Curtis Turner. Also reading in Chris Hedges' War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. I like the prose style of these two writers equally, Edelstein and Hedges. They write of radically different themes and are very different personalities. It's their prose styles I like. Both are sparse with their use of language, pared down to clarity like Danish furniture styles. Edelstein writes about the people who race cars on weekends. He tells the history of car racing at the same time he tells other stories, like in the one book, Curtis Turner's life. Turner's life pretty much amounts to the history of the beginnings of track racing. Edelstein's writing is fast and exciting in the reading. He writes with such involved engagement you feel like you're on the inside of the story, seeing it subjectively. It's a you-are-there sensation.

     Coming back around the straightaway, eighty laps into     
     a hundred-lap event and nearly in the lead, Turner
     suddenly blew two tires at once.  He jerked and spun
     and the car slammed hard into the wall, now wrecked
     beyond racing use. A fantastic run had come to an end.

     "But the people were just ecstatic," Naman said. "They
     were standing and screaming. They felt they saw something
     you only see once in a lifetime."

     Turner navigated the now-broken car into the pits during
     the yellow flag, got out, ran across the track, jumped back
     over the guardrail, and returned to his plane with another
     wave. By the time the field was taking the green flag once
     again, he was gone, off into the night like a specter.

      ---from page 58 of NASCAR Legends by Robert Edelstein

 

 

I offer this as an example of a few paragraphs I enjoyed reading, and it's all the better in context. If I did not read, I would have missed Robert Utley's biography of Sitting Bull, which I think of as one of the more significant books of my lifetime. I've read it twice and could happily read it again. I haven't really examined what it is that made reading so important when it wasn't anything to anybody in my immediate or extended family. I was "the reader." Mother and grandmother read to me pre-school, children's stories, bedtime. At age 4, the war was over, daddy came home, no more being read to. All the fun went out of everything. I was not allowed to read in the house if it wasn't homework. Finally, by my senior year, I was living in the garage and could read all I wanted. I didn't know what to read, so I read novels current movies were made from, Ben Hur, Splendor In The Grass, Doctor Zhivago, and then I heard about the beatniks, On The Road and Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Found Allen Ginsberg's Howl in a bookstore in Wichita. I felt like I'd entered the Bohemian zone going into a bookstore. It was somewhat overwhelming. It was another world from any I knew before. The atmosphere was new to me; it has a bright glow in my memory, like intense lights inside. Then I discovered Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer was made a big deal of by the Supremes because it had the word fuck in it, the 1950s. That's not all Miller wrote. The Tropics were just the beginnings of one of America's great writers.

I'm enjoying going back over poetry books, picking one up and reading in it casually for awhile. One I intend to spend some time with soon is Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967-68. I'd like to spend some time with Elizabeth Bishop, the French Surrealist poets, Ted Hughes, Rilke, Neruda, whose bones were recently exhumed to see if he'd been poisoned by the Pinochet American puppet government. He had. I'd like to go back through Harold Pinter's plays. The Caretaker has been in my mind recently as one I'd like to read now. It happens in an attic. Two brothers and a vagrant. Pinter's plays are some of the great enigmas of the 20th century, along with the plays of Jean Anouilh in France. I like to be able to read a history of China and come away with at least a cursory understanding of the country and its culture. It seems like a renascence of fiction is happening in China now. I like being able to read contemporary Chinese fiction and poetry. I like being able to read a history of Africa that starts with geology. I like to read fiction and nonfiction from all over the world. I see inside a given culture,  people live, what's important to them. Naguib Mahfouz's novels of Cairo come from a world quite other from mine. And discovering Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk was as satisfying a discovery as when I first read Mahfouz. I love discovering a writer who really lights me up, like RK Narayan of India. He tells a beautiful story. I'm glad for whatever it is in my past that gave me the reading bug. Reading has been the primary blessing of my life.

 

 

I'll not read all these books again. I'll go on like usual and read whatever I feel like at the moment. The books sit on the shelves in my mind representing many hours of some of the best enjoyment of my life. 

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MEANDERING RAMBLE THAT STARTS THERE AND ENDS HERE

red, tj worthington

Talking with my friend Carole this morning, we noted how tired we both are of the word racism, how universal it is, and now Glen Beck calling Obama a racist and Limbaugh losing advertisers. If Boner were not disingenuous in everything he said, I'd laugh at him all the harder now that he wants to pay the US debt to China and stop paying federal employees until the debt is paid. He says that is "sound" reasoning. He gets a government paycheck too, but exceptions are made for the law makers. Maybe it is sound from the point of view of somebody who hates 99% of the American people. The one percent he is working for is not you and me. We're the ones he is working against. It's another stab at Social Security. A pattern I've seen too often is the republican method of chipping away at our democracy, social security, and the constitution, like woodpeckers, getting them out of the way of the corporatocracy: it always works. The democrats let them and never reverse the police state legislation. The "sequester" played into the republican hand. It hit the people who work for a living hard, the intent. Systematically, the republican lock-step defiance of the American people uses the more ignorant (dangerous) half of the population to help in the crusade against the educated, as in dictatorial regimes. First target of authoritarians is predictably the educated (liberals), starting with the intellectuals, the very people a society needs for self-awareness, equally important in a society as in an individual.

pine swamp and glade valley from air bellows, tj worthington

Hitler took the German people's progress and turned it against them, set them back half a century. And I don't mean to be beating the dead horse of comparisons to Hitler too obvious to mention, esp that he was none too brite. Germany in the 1930s was in the foreground of modern art, until the war der Fuhrer lock-step marched the German people into, lured by promises of wealth and power. Artist Max Beckmann and several other German artists of the time exiled themselves to escape the anti-human machine their country had become over money and security. The same happened in the time of ww1. It was the exiles (draft dodgers) who kept the continuum of German art going. In warrior cultures artists are exiles at home, so it is natural for an artist to leave war making to the warrior people that create war because they want war. Artists do not want war nor lean toward racism or nationalism. The most committed artists have no choice but to exile themselves. Max Ernst another one from the ww2 period with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Andre Breton and plenty of others were run out of Paris by the German invasion, these to America. European artists in the time of ww2 spread over the world like dandelion seed-parachutes sailing on the wind, like Tibetan monks since 1957.

max ernst

Technologically advanced countries periodically run their artists and intellectuals off so the serious game of war can be played at the expense of as many people as possible, population control, enriching wealth the purpose. Weapons manufacturing is the biggest business on earth. The wars need to keep on going to keep the business going. The whole earth is covered with the weaponry of war, from Africa where they use machine guns mounted on the back of Nissan pickups and machetes, to Asian genocides, to American destruction of economies and lives in poverty stricken, defenseless countries without allies. I feel for the retired dictator in Guatemala sentenced for the rest of his life in prison for taking the American lure to destroy his own country from within to make it easier prey for corporate rape, and to make himself some money in the tradition of Latin American dictators. It went flip-flop on him. He was turned upon by the CIA, like Noriega and Pinochet. I doubt he'll be allowed to write a memoir. CIA is even more fickle than people with Money. Fickle behavior I take for absence of the most basic level of moral integrity. This is why I have never wanted money. I've never wanted the illusion of power or wealth, because moral integrity had, for some cluster of reasons, been more important to me in my youth. I don't mean to say in the absolute to the point of preaching, but practical, everyday-life forgiveness for slipping on the tightwire. It's not the straight line that is the Way, anyway. The Way is meandering like a mountain creek and a river, and farther along, the delta. I'm in my delta phase, wildly meandering slow-motion mind. I love it.

joan miro

Am I not a nutcase? Hmm. This could be an opening line in a Pinter play. I'm glad my time on earth overlapped Harold Pinter's time on earth. If I had any brains, I'd be reading Pinter's plays again, seeing them in new light, forty years later, including the experience of seeing a few on stage and film. There is much I'd like to re-read at this time of the life. The times I have tried it, I've been disappointed more than enlightened. Much of the time, it's I liked that? John Berryman's Dream Songs sing to me now. Before, they were obscure. They're still obscure, but now I can ride the flow in them like in music. I can hear the song. It's (distantly) like listening to John Lee Hooker, "One night I was layin down, I heard my papa tell mama, let that boy boogie woogie, it's in him, it's got to come out." I started Moby Dick once to re-read and was bored right away. I saved the big two-volume edition of Proust for my old age. Now that I'm here, I don't want to read it. What do I care about 19th Century pretentious French society? Maybe in a film by Andrzej Wajda, but not to sit and read when I could be enjoying so much more, like Ralph Stanley's memoir, or The Killing of Crazy Horse, or much else I feel like reading now, the Nation magazine, Gide's Journals, or The Way Things Go, Lucas Carpenter's new book of poems. .

Salvador dali

 

 

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BOB DYLAN AMERICAN POET

Tis the day before Christmas and all through the house the buzz of the refrigerator motor and the ticking of the battery-run clock on the wall blend with the rain dripping from the edge of the roof into small puddles in the stone pathway. Now the kerosene heater's fan joined the trio to make a quartet of the sounds of my silence. In my head is Bob Dylan singing Soon After Midnight, "A gal named Honey / took my money." This new Dylan stays with me like in the early years his album The Times They Are A Changin. At his beginning was Mr Tambourine Man, Blowin In The Wind, even making Man Of Constant Sorrow his own on his first album, and Like A Rolling Stone. I can't think of any song that could top Like A Rolling Stone as a song beautifully conceived, composed, written and performed. I have a Rolling Stones album with Like A Rolling Stone on it; Jagger made it his own, blues style. In youtube parlance, he owned it. All the way along, Bob Dylan has been a Star to me. But since his last five albums he has gone beyond to the place where I hold an artist like Harold Pinter, Constantin Brancusi, Larry Rivers, Marcel Duchamp, Patrick White, William Faulkner, John Berryman, Mona van Duyn. Dylan is in that level of my respect for artists. Others I read and see with appreciation and sometimes awe, but with these people I am in the presence of something so great, great in immense vastness, that I am in full appreciation of everything by these artists and several others, too many to list, Chinese writer Gao Xingjian among them.

I find when I hear Dylan now, after listening to him all my adult life, I am hearing the poet, who to my way of seeing is a great poet and songwriter in one, the great American poet, the Whitman of his time. Sometimes at the end of the day when I'm done chasing the moon, I'll click the remote to start the Dylan album. It has stayed in the cd player since the day it arrived in the house. I'll sit back, turn out the light and hear every word of the whole album like watching an audio movie. I hesitate to call him the great American poet, because it sounds like nonsense, like The Best, Number One, a Ten, unless it really is the case. Calling Whitman the great American poet sounds right to my ear. I try to think of another for that position and can't do it, unless it might be John Berryman, but that doesn't fit somehow, yet. It may in the future. But it fits Dylan at least as much as it fits Whitman. A new Bob Dylan album is the same, to my mind and ear, as a new book of poetry by Robert Lowell, great poetry. Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-1968, is one I must sit down with again in near future. My first time through it, I read it front to back like a book of prose. It scorched the tips of my hair almost as much as the first reading of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems. Yes, Jeffers. Jeffers blows my mind with poetry the same way Bob Dylan does. We have a lot of great American poetry.

 

I have loved about Dylan from the beginning that he is writing poetry in the song form of the day, rock, which Dylan kicked off. Before Dylan went electric it was called rock n roll. From Dylan on, it was rock. His poems are contemporary concerns, everyday life observations, stories both nonfiction and fiction. I imagine a future where the collected Dylan songbook is firmly in the American tradition like the Carter Family songbook for traditional musicians of the mountains. Dylan will go through time with a name up there with Shakespeare, Mozart and Tolstoy. Dylan's integrity has been a model for my own, like Gore Vidal has been in another vein, politically. At the same time I make these lofty exclamations about the artist still known as Bob Dylan, it's totally without concern about his private life, people he's shit along the way, women who divorced him, his junkie son, or even his spiritual life. I don't think if we met there would be any more to it than a handshake and a how-ya-do. That'd be it. What can I say? Yer really cool, man. I'm a nutcase living out in the mountain; he's a multi-millionaire businessman in charge of a tremendous staff of musicians, roadies, managers, recording studio, accountants, gofers, hangers-on and probably in his mind an infinite list of responsibilities and obligations when all he wanted to do was make music. With all that, and it compounded by the major trials that go with tremendous wealth and international fame, he continues to write songs that get better in a stairstep climb, much like Harold Pinter's plays in that way.

It doesn't seem far-fetched at all that Dylan needs the Nobel Prize in poetry, not for his personal sake, but for balance in the universe. Even better is to be with Tolstoy and James Joyce, distinguished for not winning the Nobel. How many poets have people wearing tshirts with their pictures and names on them? How many poets can fill a huge auditorium for a reading? How many poets sell millions of copies of every new book? You say he's a songwriter, not a poet? I say nearly every, if not every, living American poet is influenced by Dylan's writing in varying degrees per individual under 70. He took poetry back to music where it came from. Chinese poetry through the centuries was written to traditional tunes. The French poet Apollinaire wrote his poems to what we call classical music. Read his poem Zone slowly in the flow of Pachelbel's Canon while listening to it. Dylan gave his poetry to a world of people who don't read poetry anymore, except a few here and there, like a few people here and there like to listen to old-time fiddle and banjo music. That's how it is with art forms. Art goes unnoticed in pop culture but by a few unafraid of being regarded retarded by the tube-gawkers. A poet I would call Dylan's equal as poet is Louise Gluck, though she is speaking only to some of the people who read contemporary poetry. I believe I could read different poems of hers as frequently as I listen to Dylan songs. Her poem Averno I could read happily as many times as I've heard Like A Rolling Stone.

walt whitman

 





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