Encountering Louise Glück

How literature marks moments in time

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Louise Glück was one of the first poets I loved as an adult. She was one of the first contemporary poets I read, and her poems were like a gateway opening into the world of modern poetry.

Iris, by Mai Trung Thu

In 2001, when I was twenty-one, I packed up my car and drove across the country, from Eugene, Oregon to Red Hook, New York.

It was late September, only weeks after 9/11. I had finished my second season as a wildland firefighter. I was addicted to herion and drinking heavily.

Over the course of the summer I kept scrolling a website called ABC Nannies, where families posted advertisements seeking live-in nannies. I knew I couldn’t spend another winter in Eugene. The previous winter my best friend, Brett, had died of a drug overdose, plunging me into the worst depression I’ve ever experienced. I went from working odd jobs through Labor Ready to dancing at the local strip club. Days were murky and dreamlike. Nights were distorted by whichever drugs I could get my hands on.

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On my drive out to New York I detoxed, promising myself never to use heroin again. (Thankfully, I kept that promise). Following a printed map, I arrived in a picturesque village in the Hudson Valley named Red Hook. The family I worked for had two children, 5 and 7 years old. They lived in a gorgeous white Victorian house with a maroon roof and a red front door and a white picket fence. It had spires and wood floors and was on the historic register.

When one accepts a job as a live-in nanny it’s like rolling the dice. I was lucky enough to work for unpretentious, caring people whose kids were loving and sweet.

Although I stayed there less than a year (I left the following spring to work as a hotshot in California) and struggled with drinking while I was there, my time in the Hudson Valley was deeply formative. I arrived never having been exposed to the northeast and its obsession with college education. That may sound incredibly naive, but I had never spent time with people who valued education as much as the family I worked with. Because Red Hook is near Bard College I also met a lot of cool, artsy students my age, including our neighbor’s daughter, a Vassar College student the same age as me (or maybe a little older). Although some of them were pretentious, mostly they were weird like I was weird, and helped me recognize my weirdness as a kind of intelligence rather than something to be ashamed of.

There so much I could write about my time in the Hudson Valley, but I’ll focus on what I came here to say, which is that during this time my boss, a poet and scientist, handed me The Wild Iris, a book of poems written by Louise Glück.

The Wild Iris

by Louise Glück

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Death of Sophonisba by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin

Ask me how it feels to be nearly still a child, having lost your best friend less than a year before; having taken refuge in the drugs that killed him. Ask me how it feels to exist in a world where you are nearly unrecognizable to yourself, where your ideas of the world are shifting so rapidly that you can’t bear to look at everything you misunderstood and who you used to be only a few months before.

I read The Wild Iris again and again and kept it in my room until my boss had to ask after it. Each flower had something to share with me. I felt that this poet understood me so profoundly despite us coming from such different places.

Early December in Croton-on-Hudson

by Louise Glück

Spiked sun. The Hudson’s

Whittled down by ice.

I hear the bone dice

Of blown gravel clicking. Bone-

pale, the recent snow

Fastens like fur to the river.

Standstill. We were leaving to deliver

Christmas presents when the tire blew

Last year. Above the dead valves pines pared

Down by a storm stood, limbs bared . . .

I want you.

(note: I wish these poems were not centered, as that was not the poet’s intention, but it’s a limitation of this platform)

There is nothing that comes close to the experience of being seen by flat words on a page. The experience of those words being absorbed alchemically and bringing something to life inside of you.

Glück was one of those writers who made me want to be a writer. Not for any other reason except to reach myself in the past, or those like myself, who felt lost or as if they were losing or as if there was no one in the world who could understand what they were going through.

Let us be inspired by how magical, how beautiful poems can be. By writing as connective tissue, bridging distances between us and reminding us that we are not so separate from each other.

“Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.” -Louise Glück

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While reading and rereading The Wild Iris I learned to see the world in a new way. In late autumn the dried leaves transformed into tiny mice skittering dryly across the highways; the geese flying south, my first New York snow, the strange gray forests like I’d never seen all came alive. I registered for a poetry class at Duchess Community College. I imagined myself into new worlds. A gate was opened and could never again be closed.

As a writer, I am reminded of what I reach for: connection. Connection with each individual who reads my work— not by way of admiration but by way of mutual seeing. Glück was not interested in an internal dialogue but in conversations.

For the next few weeks I will read one of her poems every day, in honor of her and what she brought into the world.

Is there a poet who opened up the world for you? Who was it? Can you remember what it felt like?