The surprisingly Jewish aesthetic of new Nobel Literature Laureate Louise Glück

Louise Glück, the American daughter of Russian Jews on her mother’s side and Hungarian on her father’s, rarely writes about explicitly Jewish subject matter. The statement released by the Nobel Prize Committee cited “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”. Indeed, in her search to express an understanding of the complex variety of lived experience, she is more likely to call to Greek myth (The Triumph of Achilles, 1985) or Dante (Vita Nova, 2000) than she is to take on Biblical themes or refer to Jewish culture.

Each of her books is its own unique project, with length of lines, rhythms and tone evolving, so that the poetic forms they are written in reflects their content. Emotionally she has an equally large range: writing unflinchingly about the pain of sexual relationships yet tenderly about her son in her early collections; imagining herself as the curiously philosophical voice of flowers (The Wild Iris, 1992); reflecting on the pleasure and also the savage harm the world does to us (Averno, 2006); mapping the movement of the mind through the topography of a Mediterranean village (A Village Life, 2010); and lamenting death even while describing it as a spellbindingly adventurous kingdom (Faithful and Virtuous Night, 2014).

Many of her poems mourn familial losses. Visiting her sister’s grave, she looks towards those of her cousin and father nearby:

Like the earth itself, every stone here
is dedicated to the Jewish god
who doesn’t hesitate to take
a son from a mother.
(‘Mount Ararat’, Ararat, 1990)

Her anger is aimed at that Jewish god (note the deliberate lower case), who sent her relatives into exile and “doesn’t hesitate to take” the life of a child before that of his parent. Even though her liturgical references are more often to ‘Matins’ or ‘Vespers’, which she uses as titles of meditative poems, than to the prayers of the Siddur, her argumentative poetic quarrel with the Divine could have come from the pen of writers such as Yehuda Amichai or Elie Wiesel..

Across her body of writing there is mostly a resounding silence about other specific cultural or religious Jewish referents, yet the questioning impulse that powers her work comes from years spent in psychoanalysis (and immersed in its culturally Jewish history) while her mentors and friends include significant Jewish American poets such as Robert Pinsky and, most importantly for her development, Stanley Kunitz.

In deliberately provocative essay ‘Against Sincerity’, published in Proofs & Theories (1999), Glück argues against polemical poems that are, in her opinion, “biased” and set out to convince the reader of something or deliberately make their way to a pre-planned conclusion. Her reason? “Such work suffers from the excision of doubt.”

Glück, on the other hand, champions an openness to the world that echoes Keats’s theory of “negative capability”. She demands that writers hone their craft so they have the ability to shape their insights into poetry, but don’t use that craft to bully the reader into believing an absolute truth. Instead she advocates for creating poetry that expresses the sensuousness of thoughts as they develop, bringing the reader on the journey. Hers is a poetry of exploration not pre-determination: it calls to the reader to think for themselves, rather than dictating a set response.

“I think the great poets work this way," she said about Milton’s creative process. "That is, I think the materials are subjective but the methods are not… At the heart of that work will be a question, a problem. And we will feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one outcome. The poems themselves are like experiments, which the reader is freely invited to recreate in their own mind.”

Although she is commenting on the poetry of others, here Glück seems to be making a statement about the intentions of her own work. In her rejection of the writer as dictator, instead championing a poetics of inquiry, I would argue Glück’s approach reads as incredibly Jewish. It has the rabbinic imperative to question, framing conversations across generations as the Talmud does, as well as inviting a midrashic response from readers whom she wishes to be an active part of the text, reading their own narratives into the white space around her words.

By Aviva Dautch

Header image © Katherine Wolkoff

This is an extract from a longer piece on the poetry of Louise Glück in context of other Jewish Nobel Literature Laureates, which will appear in the Jan 2021 issue of Jewish Renaissance.

Please note, all dates cited refer to UK publication in editions by Carcanet.