Reading by poet Louise Glück inspires and informs

Her voice was characteristically scratchy and barely louder than a whisper. Yet, true to form, Louise Glück, the Pulitzer Prize-winning lyric poet, held students and faculty spellbound for 45 minutes Wednesday as she read nine poems from her latest collection, A Village Life.

The former poet laureate of the United States made history at Colgate as the fourth Pulitzer Prize winner to visit the university in a single academic year. The other three were Junot Diaz, who was honored for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Jeffrey Eugenides, for Middlesex; and Elizabeth Strout, for Olive Kitteridge.

Glück received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1993 for The Wild Iris, her sixth of 11 books of poems. Early in her career, she also authored Proofs & Theories, a collection of essays on poetry that received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction. Presently she teaches at Yale University.

After decades of writing with a minimalist’s precision, Glück changed course for the poems in her latest collection, using language that she characterized as “more relaxed, even gawky.”

Louise Glück, the Pulitzer Prize-winning lyric poet, reads from her latest collection, A Village Life on Wednesday. (Photo by Brooke Ousterhout ’10)

 

Nonetheless, the poems she read included the “punches to the gut” described in her introduction by Peter Balakian, Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in humanities. Earlier in the day, she spoke to his Post-WWII American Poetry class.

Scott Reu ’13, who reads his poetry at open mike nights and is a member of the student group Poetically Minded, came to the reading eager to ask a question that, he said, led his father to burn reams of his own early works.

Reu wanted to know: “How can writers, especially younger ones, distance themselves enough from personal experience to create poetry that really matters?”

The question was especially apropos, not only for the only American poet who has twice served as judge for the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets, but for one whose work addresses such universal issues of the human condition as being young, coming of age, love affairs beginning or ending.

“There’s a difference between the circumstantial and the intensely personal,” Glück said. “A dramatic breakup with a lover can make a great poem, but experience has to undergo a transformation. It can’t simply be decanted onto the page.”

Reu was encouraged.

“Her response set my mind to work,” he said. “I am astonished that a single answer to a single question could have such an impact on the way I think about poetry.”