Swarnim Lamsal
“Birth, not death, is the hard loss,” says Louise Elisabeth Glück in her poem “Cottonmouth Country,” indicating the motif of death and separation—especially that from mother, traumas of life and an unidealistic picture of life. These are the motifs frequently reappearing in Glück’s writing, for which she is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for the year 2020. The Swedish Committee, that chooses the winner, aptly says she has an “unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” More often, she begins her poetry on a personal note, relying particularly on her troubled growth and education, and then moves to capture some of the most enigmatic and emblematic vistas of life.
Born in 1943 in New York, Glück grew up in Long Island. In her teenage, she suffered from anorexia nervosa. This proved to be a boon in disguise: although this psychological condition challenged her, she learnt to become more independent afterwards. She also says that the death of an elder sister before she was born had affected her tremendously and she had to be even kept under psychoanalytical treatment.
As a result of her condition, Glück was never admitted into any college as a full-time student. She only took poetry classes and workshops from Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, and that too without any degrees. But this was not the beginning of her writing interest. In fact, she was determined to becoming a poet right from her teenage days, and her interest in writing poetry was kindled even earlier, when she was merely 5 to be precise. She used to be enthralled by the classical Greek stories told by her parents. She used these mythologies in some of her poems to talk about the basic nature of the humans, particularly about deception.
Glück shuns public contacts and reveres nature—one of the most common motifs of her poems—and it could be mistakenly assumed that her poetry is a result of confessional issues entirely. As a matter of fact, her writing reflects a mix of themes — disrupted familial relationship, irreverence and death on one hand, and healing, power of art, and recovery on the other. More than illustrating life in an unidealistic way, she suggests that life is an individual experience, yet each life can and does teach something about general human consciousness. For instance, when she uses the figure of Gretel (from the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale) as a traumatized figure because she has killed a human, she indicates life in “real/ black forest and the fire in earnest.” However, she also says that healing is possible, even in the bleakest of moments. She illustrates in her poem “Snow Drops”, for instance, that although she “did not expect to survive,” she is crying to expect “raw wind of the new world.” Starting from a very personal tone, she moves into a broad and public nature of human beings.
The most powerful characteristic of her poetry is arguably its poetic techniques and the purgation that it effects. She uses simple, unembellished words and symbolic characters and locations to depict the journey of life. In other words, what her poetry does is that it vivisects her personality in order to give a communal, human voice.
Although she is not much read outside her country, she is an extremely decorated poet in the US. That is seen in her recognition as the Poet Laureate of the US in 2003. Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris, 2001 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award in 2008, National Book Award in 2014, and a National Humanities Medal in 2015.
Human life can have variety, and so does her poetry. Using some minimalistic techniques, Glück sketches an intensity of human experiences. She dwells on her personal life as equally as the mythological figures and nature to give messages about death and dreariness on one hand, and rejuvenation and artistic re-enlivening on the other. Her writing focuses on tiny things but her themes talk about the grandiose aspects of life. She, as the Nobel Prize Committee says, has “candid and uncompromising voice.” The voice is nothing idealistic but contains a realistic appraisal of sensitivity towards life.
[Swarnim Lamsal, an MA in English from Tribhuvan University, is a poet and researchers. His areas of interest include myths and children’s literature. He teaches English Literature at St. Xavier’s College, Kathmandu.]