The judges chose the laureate most in tune with the changing world and the era of the pandemic, writes The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) about the awarding of the 77-year-old American poetess Louise Gluck with the Nobel Prize. The disruption caused by COVID-19 has increased stress levels and heightened personal conflicts, and the WSJ notes Gluck’s “almost brutally candid images of painful family relationships.” Another favorite motif of the poetess is the theme of trauma, loss and subsequent healing. Finally, an important topic for her is “radical change, when a leap forward is made after a deep sense of loss.”
The Swedish Academy, which selects the laureate for literature, explained that it had awarded Gluck the prize for “an unmistakable poetic voice which, with its austere beauty, makes individual existence universal.”
Gluck was born April 22, 1943 in New York. One of her deepest childhood experiences was the news that she had an older sister who died before she was born. “Her death was not an experience I had, but the absence of an older sister in my life was one,” Gluck wrote in the essay. She has a younger sister who has chosen a career as a banker. She became a vice president of Citibank and also wrote. True, prose.
Gluck’s father was a businessman who made knives and other cutting devices under the X-Acto brand. “I learned to read very early, very early,” Gluck told The American Academy of Achievement. – My father liked to write poetry, however, bad. [По его примеру] My sister and I started writing books very early. Dad printed them out, we drew illustrations. Often the text was in verse. I also started reading all the poems that I could find. I remember my grandmother, who was by no means a lover of books, found a tiny anthology.
“My father was interested in history and politics, my mother liked art, but I would not say that she was well versed in it,” Gluck continued. But both parents supported her passion for poetry.
There were attempts to turn aside. For some time, Gluck dreamed of becoming an actress. But later I realized that I just wanted fame, I wanted to be applauded. Yes, she memorized the texts well, but she did not have stage talent. And Gluck returned to poetry.
She sent her first poems to the publishing house at the age of 13-14, and they were wrapped. She sent poems to magazines, received refusals, but did not despair and sent again. Poems became her outlet: “I seemed strange to other children, but they were disgusting to me. I became quite withdrawn, and then I developed severe anorexia nervosa.” Another possible cause of the disease, Gluck calls the desire to defend his independence in front of his mother. The plan worked: the young poetess was taken away from school for home schooling, her mother behaved kindly and helpfully. But Louise herself nearly died of exhaustion. I had to be treated.
Sessions with a psychoanalyst became, in her words, “one of the greatest experiences in life.” “Psychoanalysis helps me live, it taught me how to think,” she told The Washington Post. But due to illness, she never received a higher education. After graduating from high school in 1961, Louise began taking poetry classes at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York.
“It was exciting. I became part of a world of people who are interested in the same things that I am, Gluck told The American Academy of Achievement. “I’ve had wonderful teachers who are very, very good at bringing out the very different talents inherent in their students.” The teachers were bright personalities. For example, the poetess Leonie Adams with an unusual habit of smoking about eight cigarettes at a time during class. She lit one, put it down somewhere, and lit the next one. By the end of the lesson, cigarettes were smoldering all over the classroom. To another teacher, the famous poet and literary critic Stanley Kunitz, Gluck is grateful for the advice, which later came in handy more than once: the poet needs a lot of patience, and also very thick skin, because he will face many humiliations in life.
First collections
Gluck worked as a secretary and continued to write poetry. Her creative debut – the collection “Firstborn” (Firstborn) appeared in 1968 and was well received by critics. Following the success came a long creative crisis. She was offered to try her hand at teaching, but she refused, because “poets should not teach.”
However, when Goddard College of Vermont invited her to participate in a poetry discussion with students in 1971, Gluck felt at home. “I have to live here,” she decided. She was so naive that she took the compliment “you are so talented that you can teach here even tomorrow” for a job offer and sent her consent. It was awkward, but fortunately for everyone, four days before the start of the semester, a position was found for her. Gluck recalls that, having started teaching, she became happy again. The creative crisis ended, and in 1975 a second collection, The House on Marshland, was published, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which is awarded for “exceptional creativity.”
After Goddard College, Gluck worked at the University of Iowa, Warren Wilson College (North Carolina), Williams College (Massachusetts), California University, Harvard University, and now Yale University.
In 1980, she published the collection Descending Figure, and in 1985, The Triumph of Achilles, which received awards from various literary organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tragedies often gave impetus to the creation of the Glitch collection. “The Triumph of Achilles” appeared after the fire that destroyed her house. As the title suggests, the collection is inspired by Greek mythology, rife with tragic events. Gluck received the National Book Critics Circle Award for this work. The death of her father led to the creation of the collection “Ararat” (Ararat, 1990), which critics, playing with the name, called the pinnacle of Gluck’s work – until her next book appeared.
“At the age of about 50, I began to write very quickly,” she told The American Academy of Achievement. – The collection “Wild Iris” (The Wild Iris, 1992) was written in its entirety – with the exception of perhaps five poems – in just 6-8 weeks. In “Wild Iris” the flowers talk to the gardener – some kind of divine essence – about life, men, God. This collection earned Gluck the Pulitzer Prize.
It was followed by “Fake Orange” (Mock Orange, 1993) and “Meadows” (Meadowlands, 1997). The next books of poetry, Vita Nova (1999) and The Seven Ages (2001), were born as quickly as Wild Iris, in a month and a half, 4-5 poems each. day. “The day before you pick up the pen, you are completely empty. And in six weeks you already have a book. And then you feel exhausted, completely sick, ”the poetess told The American Academy of Achievement.
The tragedy of September 11, 2001 prompted Gluck to write the poem “October” (October, 2004). Then came “Averno” (Averno, 2006), “Rural Life” (A Village Life, 2009), a collection of poems 1962-2012. (Poems: 1962–2012, released 2012) and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), for which she won a National Book Award. In total, Gluck has more than 20 literary awards, to which the Nobel Prize has now been added.
Although she has written two collections of essays on poetry and a dozen prefaces to books by young poets, she assures me that prose is not her story. She enjoys reading, drawing inspiration for poetry from books. “Fiction is like cooking for me. This is pure pleasure. I don’t want to tarnish the process with my participation,” she ironically told The American Academy of Achievement.
Gluck has been married twice and divorced twice. From her second marriage, she has a son, Noah, who works as a sommelier in San Francisco. Gluck says that she herself likes to drink a little wine from time to time and, on the advice of her son, prefers Chateau Cheval Blanc.