Originally Posted by
RonPrice
Two Different Leagues in the Sea of Poetry
Part 1:
As far back as I can remember, and my memories go back to the late 1940s when I was still in early childhood (usually defined by developmental psychologists as the time period from the age of two until at least the age of five years), I have found that the people in my life had a wide-range of attitudes to, and beliefs about, me. This is a common human experience, is hardly surprising, and should not raise any eyebrows.
In the last 30 years, 1983 to 2013, years during which I have had my poetry and prose published, this same range of appreciations exist: from high praise, to intense criticism and dislike, to outright indifference.
In the last 24 hours I came across the poetry of Louise Gluck and found a similar range of reactions to her work. This prose-poem is about the reactions of others to both her life and work, and the reactions of others to mine.
Part 2:
“A Glück poem is determined to wrest meaning from circumstance, to force a pattern over the chaos of a lived life.” So writes Irish poet and novelist, Nick Laird(1975- ), about the poetry of Louise Gluck, and so I could write in the same vein about some of the purpose of my own prose-poetic output over the last thirty years.
Gluck wrote, in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993, “poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response.”1 In the case of my poetry, though, the trappings of chronology and comment are part and parcel of my modus operandi and style.-Ron Price with thanks to 1Nick Laird, “The Triumph of the Survivor”, a review of Louise Glück’s Poems 1962-2012 in The New York Review of Books, 21/3/’13.
Part 3:
Louise Elisabeth Glück was born 15 months before I was not that far as the crow flies---on this planet that is gravitating slowly into a neighborhood---from where I was born. We both belong to that generation ‘the-war-babies’. She is an American poet and has been publishing her poetry since 1968. I had hardly scratched the surface of my poetic life by 1968, but I had begun to have the kind of experiences that, in part, led to the kind of poetry that was the Gluck trademark: suffering, depression and alienation. My experiences, my philosophy, my religion, my poetry went in very different directions.
This most famous of modern American poets was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. I am not in Louise’s poetic league having only published poetry on the internet for the last decade: 2003 to 2013. My fame is measured in nanoseconds across the 200 to 300 million websites, and their 2 to 3 billion users. Gluck’s fame is measured across more than 40 years of publications, as well as the praise, the opinions, and opprobrium of many. My writing shares some similarities to her style and content, but we are very different people and poets.
Part 4:
The fragmentation of your work hints
at a mind trying to order itself…wrest
meaning from circumstance,1 and that’s
what I’ve been trying to do for decades.
Our poetic works record a movement
from emotional instability to regained
control, and so much else. My poetry,
too, is self-centred, often colloquial &
in an idiom of ordinary speech. I write
of both a fallen world as well as a new
one that is embryonic, just been born:
an embryogenesis, vivid planetization,
globalization, a sense and sensibility of
one world, one humanity, one religion.
1 Few poets have sounded as depressed or as alienated as Gluck; poetry and the visionary are intertwined; part of her impetus is Greek and Roman mythology; she writes poetry that leads readers to their inner world; it is poetry that uses straightforward language and can be understood by readers; it is close to the diction of ordinary speech, but it is far from colloquial.
Her poetry is self-centred and comes directly from her life, her losses and tragedies, her inner life. She is the poet of a fallen world. Her work explores the agony of the self, failed love-affairs and existential despair.-Ron Price with thanks to Poetry Foundation: upthebumnoharmdone.com
Part 5:
In Brian Henry’s review of The Seven Ages (2001)by Louise Glück in Contemporary Poetry Review, entitled “Louise Gluck’s Monumental Narcissism”, 8 July 2003, he writes:
“Very few lives are interesting, and even fewer are sufficiently interesting to spawn nine books of autobiographical poetry. Louise Glück’s life might be richer than most, but in her continued fetishization of her life and her self--not the self that eats and sleeps and pays bills, but “Louise Glück The Poet” self--she demonstrates a disconcerting inability to find her way out of the cul-de-sac of subjectivity.”
“She has forgotten how to imagine, or even re-imagine, her life. Instead, she looks upon her past in The Seven Ages (2001) and assumes it’s of interest solely because she is Louise Glück. Only poets accustomed to thinking of themselves as Poets would try to get away with this. In The Seven Ages Glück views herself not as a person but as a protagonist, the world not as a place but as a stage, as Shakespeare did in his “all the world’s a stage.”
Whether or not this introspection is the result of years of psychoanalysis, the posturing becomes tedious. Increasingly at an imaginative loss, Glück mines her private life in a way both exhibitionist and narcissistic.1
Part 6:
Is my poetry exhibitionist as it
solicits interest? Is it narcissistic
as it presumes the interest? Is it
a naïve brand of obsessive self-
reflection or self-love? Has my
self-scrutiny become ridiculous
in its perseverance and cavalier
in its assumptions? Are these
poems just a form of memoir?
I use this genre to try to explain
my life…explore my experience.
Does my writing depend on my
identity to be interesting?....My
poems are successful to me but
only, I’m sure, to a few readers.
My poetry is, it seems to me, a
matter of a certain marketing: is
this art? Well, it is to me, and a
few others who read my work.
My poems embrace spheres beyond the self,
transforming my life into a rich imaginative
realm which illuminates the vast field of the
psycho-emotional constructing as I travel
this literary road: a life, society, a religion.
Part 7:
1 Brian Henry has published poetry and criticism in numerous magazines around the world including: the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, New American Writing, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Stand, Overland, and Threepenny Review.
His first book of poetry, Astronaut,appeared recently in the UK and in Slovenia in translation. Astronaut was published in 2000 in the US by Carnegie Mellon University Press. His second book, Graft, was published in 2003 by New Issue Press and by Arc in England. He has edited the international magazine Verse since 1995, and was a Fulbright scholar in Australia in 1997-98, where he was Poetry Editor of Meanjin. He teaches at the University of Georgia.
Ron Price
10/4/’13.
