Dana White For Louise Glück, Poetry Was Survival

For Louise Glück, Poetry Was Survival

dana white

What was the year? 1983? I hadn’t been a poet long, but long enough to know that Louise Glück was one of my idols. With Plath and Sexton, she fit into a type of brilliant, complex women I imagined myself to be. Without the transcendent talent, but good enough to fall into the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. When poet Charles Wright of the MFA program faculty announced Louise Glück would be a visiting professor, I couldn’t believe my luck.

She was tiny, and nervous. Charles Wright was very solicitous of her, almost gallant. The students were in awe. By this time, she’d published three books of poems, Firstborn, The House on Marshland, and Descending Figure. Perhaps she saw in me the same tendency to place every word just so, the short lines, the near obsession with line breaks and oblique meanings and sexually charged imagery.

As the New York Times put it recently, “It’s part of her greatness that her poems are relatively easy to access while impossible to utterly get to the bottom of. They have echoing meanings; you can tangle with them for a long time.”

As a teacher she was never cruel or sarcastic in her criticism, but encouraging of everyone, regardless of style.

One day in class she said she needed a volunteer to teach her undergraduate workshop because she had another commitment. Only two of us raised our hands. She asked us for a few poems and then chose me, saying something like she felt more of a kinship with my work. I went home and cried.

On the last day of the workshop, I asked her to sign my copy of Firstborn. She literally recoiled, saying, “That book embarrasses me. I was so young!” Yes, a youthful prodigy who drew on her inner pain to produce breathlessly beautiful poems. “But I love it,” I said, and she acquiesced. She jotted an inscription and gave it back: “For Dana, with admiration for your sharp intelligence and gusto. Not many better combinations. Warmly, Louise.”

She threw a party at her house in Laguna Beach. I remember she wore a colorful offthe-shoulder peasant blouse and served a lovely tray of tomato and fish, maybe salmon. She put on music and danced and flirted, which surprised me, since her poems denoted someone who sat around all day smoking cigarettes and wearing black. Her poems were dark and stark, but she clearly relished life.

I didn’t stay a poet long enough to have early work to be embarrassed by. The poetic muse deserted me, though I enjoyed the entanglement while it lasted.

The summer before entering the MFA program at UCI, I interned at a big newspaper

in Southern California. While there I dated, quite briefly, a reporter who told me, “Poetry always struck me as a parlor trick.” Perhaps he was right. For me it was. For Louise Glück, I believed, poetry was survival.

I ended up a journalist of sorts. But over subsequent decades, every time Louise Glück released a new book, I bought it, and read it. These volumes occupy an entire shelf in my library, a testament to one who survived.

And now I can say when I was twenty I sat in as a teacher for a remarkable poet who went on to win the Nobel Prize forty years later. Which is something, I guess.