Louise Glück (pronounced 'glick' )

Highlights of Poetry. Index of poetry. How to Write Poetry. Books read.

How to write specific forms: Haibun. Haiku. Hay(na)ku. Rengay. Tanka. Concrete. Ghazal. Lai. Pantoum. Prose poem. Rondeau. Rubáiyát. Sestina. Skaldic verse. Sonnet. Terza rima. Triolet. Tritina. Villanelle.

Poets: Adam Zagajewski. Aleda Shirley. Anne Carson. The Beowulf Poet. Billy Collins. Billy Collins exercise. Snorri's Edda. Carl Dennis. Charles Atkinson. Corey Marks. François Villon Franz Wright. Galway Kinnell. Gary Young. The Gawain Poet. Jack Gilbert. Jane Hirshfield. Jorie Graham. Karen Braucher. Karl Shapiro. Kay Ryan. Laureate Poets: Britain; USA. Louise Glück. Len Anderson. Li-Young Lee. Linda Pastan. Nordic Skalds. Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A). Richard Hugo. Robert Bly. Sara Teasdale. Snorri's Edda. Stephen Dunn. Ted Kooser. W.S. Merwin.

Louise Glück featured in Best American Poetry:

• 2010, guest editor Amy Gerstler, with "At the River".
• 2003, guest editor Yusef Komunyakaa, with "Landscape" republished in her Averno.
• 2002, guest editor Robert Creeley, with "Reunion".
• 2001, guest editor Robert Hass, with "Time".
• 1999, guest editor Robert Bly, with "Vita Nova", republished in her Vita Nova.
• 1991, guest editor Mark Strand, with "Celestial Music", republished in her Ararat.

Books:

Ararat. Averno. Descending Figure. Firstborn. The Garden.

The House on Marshland. Meadowlands. Seven Ages. The Triumph of Achilles.

Vita Nova. The Wild Iris.

Poetry. Prose. Time line. Links and Books.

General attributes of books of poems by Louise Glück

• Often includes poem about a myth that has some bearing on the emotional emphasis (such as a divorce, sibling rivalry, etc.) of the poems about her actual life.
• Poems of each book are in a single undivided section.
• Line length is erratic, ranging from single words to more than one line, sometime in the same poem. The poems look like ragged fragments.
• Other immense variations that add to the erratic appearance of the work occur in:
  1. Stanza length, in terms of lines per stanza. Stanza length varies hugely (even in the same poem), being from 1 to 10 or more lines. Fewer than 2% of the read poems have a constant stanza size throughout.
  2. Stanzas per poem: varies hugely within each book, from 1 to 18 stanzas per poem.
• The most common sizes are roughly (and prior to including data from Averno onward):
  1. Lines per stanza: 4 lines per stanza seems the most common, followed by 2 lines per stanza, then 3 lines per stanza.
  2. Stanzas per poem: 4 stanzas per poem seems the most common, followed by 8 stanzas per poem.
• A death grip on using punctuation, which adds to the sprinkled and peppery look of her poems.
  • Half or more use at least one colon, and half use at least one dash.
  • Almost half use a question mark and almost half use a semicolon.
  • Roughly a sixth use parentheses and a seventh use italics.
  • A twentieth use an exclamation point.

Poetry of Louise Glück. [Glück rhymes with click.]
Books are shown alphabetically. Time line is at the end.

Ararat (1990)

Book log for Glück's Ararat.

• Her sixth book of poems.
• Main emphasis is sibling competition, particularly for the affection of the mother.
• No dedication.
• Almost no mythology (one mention of the Fates and one of Adam).
• Favorite poems include:
  • "Lover of Flowers"
  • "Brown Circle"

    "My mother want to know why, if I hate family so much, I went ahead and had one. ... I must learn to forgive my mother, now that I'm helpless to spare my son." © Louise Glück

  • "Animals", which starts:

    "My sister and I reached the same conclusion: the best way to love us was to not spend time with us." © Louise Glück

  • "Cousins"
  • "First Memory", which ends:

    "in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved." © Louise Glück

• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • Ironwood

• Sample statistics:
  • 31 poems, 54 pages, average of 1.8 pages per poem.
  • Mode is 2 pages (16 poems); 13 poems are 1 page and 3 poems are 3 pages.
  • Poems presented without being grouped into sections.
  • Some of the most common words (from the first half (16 of 31 poems) show the emphasis on family and females:
    • mother (32 instances so averages 2/poem)
    • child/children (16 instances so averages 1/poem)
    • death/dead/dying/died (15 instances so averages almost 1/poem)
    • sister (14 instances so averages almost 1/poem)
    • flower(s) (10 instances so averages 1 every other poem)
    • daughter ( 9 instances so averages 1 every other poem)
    • father ( 9 instances so averages 1 every other poem)
    • love ( 8 instances so averages 1 every other poem)
    • heart ( 7 instances so averages 1 every other poem)
    • family ( 7 instances so averages 1 every other poem)
    • woman/women ( 7 instances so averages 1 every other poem)
  • Some of the most common punctuation from the 20 poems (of 31, so about two-thirds) in 35 pages show:
    • colon (in 16 (80%) of 20 poems)
    • semicolon (in 13 (65%) of 20 poems)
    • dashes (in 8 (40%) of 20 poems)
    • question mark (in 2 (10%))
    • parentheses (in 0 ( 0%))
    • italics (in 5 (25%))
    • exclamation mark (in 0 (0%))
  • Addresses 'you' (in 6 (30%) of first 20 poems)
  • Stanzas per poem (rough count) shows a bimodal peak at 4 and 7 stanzas:
    1. 4 poems.
    2. 1
    3. 4
    4. 7
    5. 5
    6. 2
    7. 7
    8. 1
    9. 1
  • Lines per stanza (rough count) shows a mode of 4 (with 3 lines a close second):
    1. 0
    2. 10 lines.
    3. 33
    4. 34
    5. 22
    6. 13
    7. 7
    8. 10
    9. 5
    10. 5
    11. 4
    12. 1
    13. 1
    14. 0
    15. 1
    16. 1
    17. 1
    with one outlier at 28 stanzas.

Averno (2006)

• Her 11th collection of poems.
• Her finest book so far.
  • These poems often have relatively clear narratives, which gives me more of a handle on them.
  • Interleaves the difficulty of being immersed in an undesired life and struggling to leave it with the mythology of the living martyr Persephone, who spent the winter of each year in the hell (from her mother Demeter's point of view and perhaps Persephone's) of living with Hades her husband.
• Dedication for Noah.
• Favorite poems include:
  • "Crater Lake"
  • "Echoes"
  • "A Myth of Innocence"
  • "A Myth of Devotion"
  • "Averno"
• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • The New Yorker
  • The New York Times
  • Poetry
  • The Threepenny Review
  • Tricycle
  • Slate
• Unusually (except for her early books), it's in two numbered sections.
• Also unusually (compared with past poems), many poems are grouped into sections, each of which is often a page or two long and thus of modern 'poem length'.

• Sample statistics:
  • Relatively few words of the senses (data below from the first section), especially compared with books like Aleda Shirley in Dark Familiar:
    • touch: averages about 1 word per poem; particularly cold and burn/burned/burning.
    • color: averages about 0.7 words per poem; particularly black, white, and sometimes red.
    • smell: 0.2 per poem for words of smell (if one includes 'no more smelling').
    • sound: 0.2 per poem for words of sound (cries, whistle).
    • taste: 0.2 per poem for words of taste (if one includes 'no more eating').
  • 18 poems, 70 pages of poetry, average = 4 pages per poem.
  • 7 (40%) of the poems are grouped into sections.
  • Punctuation from the 18 poems:
    • dashes (in 14 (80%) of 18 poems)
    • italics (in 12 (65%) of 18 poems)
    • colon (in 11 (60%) of 18 poems)
    • question mark (in 10 (55%))
    • semicolon (in 8 (45%))
    • parentheses (in 2 (10%))
    • lacuna (in 1 ( 5%))
    • exclamation mark (in 0 (0%))
  • 7 (40%) of the 18 poems address 'you'
  • Sections per poem:
    1. 11 poems.
    2. 0
    3. 1
    4. 0
    5. 5
    6. 1
    7. 0
    8. 0
    9. 0
    10. 0
    11. 0
    12. 0
    13. 1
    with outliers: 1 poem with 20 stanzas and 1 poem with 22 stanzas.
  • Stanzas per section (rather than poem) in the first part of the book shows a rough count as below, mode of 2 stanza per section:
    1. 10 sections.
    2. 16
    3. 12
    4. 3
    5. 3
    6. 1
    7. 3
    8. 0
    9. 1
    10. 0
    11. 0
    12. 0
    13. 2
    14. 1
    15. 0
    with an outlier of 1 section (poem) with 29 stanzas.
  • Lines per stanza (rough count from every 5th page, starting at page 5) shows a mode of 2 (with 3 lines a close second), and far fewer longer stanzas than in previous books:
    1. 14
    2. 30 stanza with 2 lines.
    3. 26
    4. 13
    5. 5
    6. 3
    7. 0
    8. 0
    9. 1
    10. 0

Descending Figure (1980)

• Her fourth book of poems.

Firstborn (1968)

• Her first book of poems.

The Garden (1976)

• Her third book of poems.

The House on Marshland (1975)

• Her second book of poems.

Meadowlands (1996)

Book log for Glück's Meadowlands.

• Her eighth book of poems.
• To Robert and Frank.
• Main topics are aspects of The Odyssey and the collapse of a marriage. Telemachus (son of Penelope and Odysseus) appears in 7 poems, Circe in 3, and Penelope in 2. Mostly their poems (the mythology poems) are presented as single-stanza. Many of the poems have a bitter edge.
• Dedication to Robert and Frank.
• Favorite poems include:
  • "Parable of the Hostages"
  • "Telemachus' Kindness"
  • "Telemachus' Fantasy"
  • "Telemachus' Burden"
  • "Parable of the Swans"
  • "Purple Bathing Suit"

• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • Agni Review
  • Antaeus
  • The New Yorker
  • Ploughshares
  • The Threepenny Review

• Sample statistics:
  • 46 poems, 59 pages, average of 1.3 pages per poem.
  • Mode is 1 pages (35 poems); 11 poems are 2 pages.
  • Poems presented without being grouped into sections.
  • Some of the most common words (from the first half (22 poems in 30 pages) show the emphasis on love and men:
    • love [and variants like loves, loved] ( 14 instances so about 65% of the poems)
    • heart [and variants like heartbreaking] ( 9 instances so about 45% of the poems)
    • light [and variants like headlight] ( 8 instances so about 40% of the poems)
    • dark ( 7 instances so about 30% of the poems)
    • man/men ( 7 instances so about 30% of the poems)
    • child/children ( 7 instances so about 30% of the poems)
    • hand ( 5 instances so about 20% of the poems)
    • tree ( 5 instances so about 20% of the poems)
  • Some of the most common punctuation from the first 22 poems (of 46, so almost half):
    • semicolon (in 17 (80%) of 22 poems)
    • colon (in 14 (65%) of 22 poems)
    • question mark (in 13 (60%))
    • dashes (in 10 (45%))
    • parentheses (in 2 ( 9%))
    • italics (in 2 ( 9%))
    • exclamation mark (in 1 (5%))
  • Addresses 'you' (in 13 (60%) of first 22 poems)
  • Stanzas per poem (rough count) shows the mode at 1 stanza; later books rarely include single-stanza poems:
    1. 20 poems.
    2. 0
    3. 2
    4. 4
    5. 8
    6. 1
    7. 1
    8. 4
    9. 3
    10. 3
  • Unusually, a few poems are written with the same number of lines per stanza, usually 3. A rough count of lines per stanza shows a bimodal peak of 2 lines and 3 lines:
    1. 15
    2. 41
    3. 41
    4. 31
    5. 19
    6. 11
    7. 3
    8. 1
    9. 4
    10. 0
    11. 0
    12. 1
    13. 0
    14. 1
    15. 0
    16. 2
    17. 0
    18. 0
    19. 1
    20. 0
    21. 1
    22. 1
    23. 0
    24. 3
    25. 0
    26. 0
    27. 1
    28. 1
    29. 1
    30. 1

  Outliers: one poem has 35 stanzas, one has 42, one has 43, and one has 47.

The Seven Ages (2001)

Book log for Glück's Seven Ages.

• Her tenth collection (though the inside book jacket lists it as her ninth collection of poems).
• For Noah and Tereze.
• The inside cover calls this book "her strangest" yet. I agree. I have no clue about a lot of these poems.
• My favorite poem is "Ancient Text", which starts:
  

  "How deeply fortunate my life, my every prayer heard by angels. I asked for the earth; I received earth, like so much mud in the face." © Louise Glück

  and which ends:
  

  "I was a winged obsessive, my moonlit feathers were paper. I lived hardly at all among men and women; I spoke only to angels. How fortunate my days, how charged and meaningful the nights' continuous silence and opacity." © Louise Glück

• Other poems that I like somewhat are:
  • "Exalted Image"
  • "Birthday"

    "That is the problem of silence one cannot test one's ideas. Because they are not ideas, they are the truth." © Louise Glück

  • "Mitosis"
  • "Aubade"

• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • The American Poetry Review
  • Gastronomica
  • The Kenyon Review
  • The New York Review of Books
  • The New Yorker
  • Salmagundi
  • Slate
  • The Threepenny Review
  • Tri-Quarterly

• Sample statistics:
  • 44 poems, 66 pages, average of 1.5 pages per poem.
  • Mode is 1 page (24 poems); 18 poems are 2 pages and 3 poems are 3 pages.
  • Poems presented without being grouped into sections.

  • The difficulty with the content made me more aware than ever of the complexity of Louise Glück's use of punctuation. Some of the most common punctuation from the first half of the book (33 pages, 22 of 44 poems) show:
    • dashes (in 13 (60%) of 22 poems)
    • question mark (in 12 (55%))
    • parentheses (in 3 (14%))
    • italics (in 3 (14%))
    • exclamation mark (in 1 (5%))

  • Also in the first half of the book, 8 (37%) have the word you. Sometimes it means 'I' or 'one' and sometimes it means an explicit but unnamed person. Sometimes it seems to mean 'you, reader'. Sometimes it just floats.

    The problem with most of these 'you' poems is that when I try to work out who is the 'you' I am distracted from the poem.

  • Stanzas per poem (rough count) shows the mode at 8 stanzas:
    1. 2 poems.
    2. 0
    3. 0
    4. 1
    5. 5
    6. 6
    7. 5
    8. 9
    9. 7
    10. 4
    11. 0
    12. 1
    13. 0
    14. 1
    15. 1
    16. 1
    17. 1

  • Lines per stanza (rough count) shows a mode of 2 (with 3 lines a close second and 4 lines a close third):
    1. 17.
    2. 86 stanzas with 2 lines.
    3. 75
    4. 71
    5. 42
    6. 29
    7. 20
    8. 7
    9. 2
    10. 1
    11. 1
    12. 1
    13. 0
    14. 1

The Triumph of Achilles (1985)

Book log for Glück's The Triumph of Achilles.

• Her fifth book of poems (if we include The Garden, which she omits from The Triumph of Achilles list of prior publications).
• A strong collection, often with a startling juxtaposition of the desired and the revolting.
• Dedication to Charles Clay Dahlberg.
• A sulky-looking poet on the inside-back-cover is consistent with the crankiness of some of the poems.
• Favorite poems include:
  • "The Mountain", which ends:

    "the artist lies because he is obsessed with attainment, that he perceives the summit as that place where he will live forever, a place about to be transformed by his burden: with every breath, I am standing at the top of the mountain. Both my hands are free. And the rock has added height to the mountain." © Louise Glück

  • "Day Without Night"
• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • Antaeus
  • The New Republic
  • The New Yorker
  • Pequod
  • Salmagundi
  • Yale Review
• In three numbered sections. The title poem, in the third section centers on the role of the survivor and poet surrogate as manipulator of the record:

  "Always in these friendships one serves the other, one is less than the other: the hierarchy is always apparent, though the legends cannot be trusted -- their source is the survivor, the one who has been abandoned." © Louise Glück

• Sample statistics:
  • Relatively few words of the senses (data below from the 11 poems of the first section), especially compared with books like Aleda Shirley in Dark Familiar:
    • touch: 9 poems (82%) have word(s) suggesting touch.
    • color: 6 (55%).
    • sound: 3 (27%).
    • smell: 2 (18%).
    • taste: 1 (9%).
  • 26 poems, 53 pages of poetry, average = 2 pages per poem.
  • 7 (27%) of the poems are grouped into sections.
  • Punctuation from the 26 poems:
    • dashes (in 21 (80%) of 26 poems)
    • semicolon (in 21 (80%) of 26 poems)
    • colon (in 20 (75%) of 26 poems)
    • question mark (in 20 (75%) of 26 poems)
    • italics (in 4 (15%) of 26 poems)
    • exclamation mark (in 0))
    • lacuna (in 0)
    • parentheses (in 0)
  • 11 (40%) of the 26 poems address 'you'
  • Pages per poem:
    1. 16 poems of 26 are a single page.
    2. 3
    3. 4
    4. 2
    5. 0
    6. 0
    7. 0
    8. 0
    9. 0
    10. 0
    11. 1
  • Sections per poem:
    1. 18 poems of 26 have a single section.
    2. 0
    3. 2
    4. 1
    5. 1
    6. 1
    7. 0
    8. 1
    9. 2
  • Stanzas per section (rather than poem) in the first part of the book shows a rough count as below, mode of 1 stanza per section:
    1. 12 sections have 1 stanza.
    2. 1
    3. 3
    4. 1
    5. 2
    6. 1
    7. 1
    8. 1
  • Lines per stanza (rough count from every 5th page, starting at page 5 for a total of 12 pages) shows a strong mode of 3; no stanzas are very long:
    1. 1 stanza has one line.
    2. 9 stanzas have 2 lines.
    3. 19
    4. 7
    5. 3
    6. 2
    7. 6
    8. 3
    9. 1
    10. 2
    11. 1

Vita Nova (1999)

Book log for Glück's Vita Nova.

• Her ninth book of poems (if we include The Garden, which she omits from Vita Nova list of prior publications).

• To Kathryn Davis, Karen Kennerly, and Ellen Bryant Voigt. And to Tom and Vera Kreilkamp. Special thanks to Meredith Hoppin and Ellen Pinsky.
• Some poems concern the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice; only 3 of the 32 (10%) name Orpheus explicitly and 2 of the 32 (7%) name Eurydice, but they appear by implication in other poems. Eurydice (in the legend) died of a snake bite while trying to escape a would-be rapist and died a second time when Orpheus charmed his way into Hades to bring her back to life, and then disobeyed his promise so that she died a second time. Glück (at least in "Lute Song" as quoted below) prefers the role of Orpheus rather then Eurydice.
• Other mythological figures are named. 2 of the 32 (7%) name Dis, the lord of the underworld, husband of Persephone. 2 of the 32 (7%) name Aeneus. Aphrodite, Dido, the Fates, Penelope, and Venus are each named in 1 of the 32 (3%).
• Several other poems may involve her divorce.
• Mystified by many of these poems. Not enough clarity on context to make a connection.
• My favorite poem is "Lute Song", which starts:
  

  "No one wants to be the muse; in the end, everyone wants to be Orpheus." © Louise Glück

  and which ends:
  

  "my anguish ... remains the struggle for form and my dreams ... less the wish to be remembered than the wish to survive, which is, I believe, the deepest human wish." © Louise Glück

• Acknowledges first publications in:
  • American Poetry Review
  • The New Yorker
  • Slate
  • Threepenny Review
  • Yale Review

• Sample statistics:
  • 32 poems, 51 pages, average of 1.6 pages per poem.
  • Mode is 2 pages (17 poems); 14 poems are 1 page and 3 poems are 3 pages.
  • Poems presented without being grouped into sections.

  • As in other books, the difficulty with the content made me again aware that Louise Glück has a very complex use of punctuation. Some of the most common punctuation from the first 60% of the book (30 pages, 20 of 32 poems) show:
    • colon (in 11 (55%) of 20 poems)
    • dash (in 11 (55%) of 20 poems)
    • question mark (in 9 (45%))
    • semicolon (in 8 (40%))
    • parentheses (in 4 (20%))
    • italics (in 2 (10%))
    • exclamation mark (in 1 (5%))

  • Also in the first half of the book, 8 (37%) have the word you. Sometimes it means 'I' or 'one' and sometimes it means an explicit but unnamed person. Sometimes it seems to mean 'you, reader'. Sometimes it just floats.

    The problem with most of these 'you' poems is that when I try to work out who is the 'you' I am distracted from the poem.

  • Stanzas per poem (rough count) shows the mode at 4 and 5 stanzas:
    1. 3 poems.
    2. 0
    3. 2
    4. 4
    5. 4
    6. 3
    7. 2
    8. 2
    9. 1
    10. 1
    11. 1
    12. 1
    13. 2
    14. 1
    15. 2
    16. 1
    17. 1
    18. 1

  • Lines per stanza (rough count) shows a mode of 4 (with 2 lines a close second and 3 lines third):
    1. 39 stanzas have 1 line.
    2. 51
    3. 41
    4. 54
    5. 30
    6. 12
    7. 9
    8. 8
    9. 1
    10. 3
    11. 3

    with three single-stanza poems of 20, 23, and 42 lines.

The Wild Iris (1992, paperback reprint 1994)

• Her seventh book of poems.
• The collection was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
• Many poems in it that I like.
• A lot of poems address 'you', a style that I find exclusionary and not a fan of that style. Nonetheless, the poems do mostly work. Some are marvelous.
• The most interesting poems are in the persona of the god who addresses 'you' - maybe addressing the persona of the poet.
• Book log for Glück's The Wild Iris.

Prose

Proofs and Theories (1992, paperback reprint 1994)

Buy Proofs and Theories

• A somewhat uneven collection of 12 essays on modern and contemporary poetry:
  • Education of the Poet
  • The Idea of Courage:

    "No matter what the materials, the act of composition remains, for the poet, an act, or condition, of ecstatic detachment. The poems' declared subject has no impact on this state; however assessment is subsequently revised, the poet engaged in the act of writing feels giddy exhilaration; no occasion in life calls less for courage than does this." [p. 25] and "For poets, speech and fluency seem less an act of courage than a state of grace. The intervals of silence, however, require a stoicism very like courage; of these, no reader is aware." [p. 27]

  • Against Sincerity [as opposed, say, to the authenticity of the reliable and credible]

    "By actuality I mean to refer to the world of events, by truth to the embodied vision, illumination, or enduring discovery which is the ideal of art, and by honesty or sincerity to 'telling the truth,' which is not necessarily the path to illumination. ... The artist's task, then, involves the transformation of the actual to the true." [p. 33] and "the source of art is experience, the end product truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in the service of truth. ... There is, unfortunately, no test for truth. That is, in part, why artists suffer. The love of truth is felt as chronic aspiration and chronic unease. If there is no test for truth, there is no possible security. The artist, alternating between anxiety and fierce conviction, must depend on the latter to compensate for the sacrifice of the sure. It is relatively easy to say that truth is the aim and heart of poetry, but harder to say how it is recognized or made. We know it first, as readers, by its result, by the sudden rush of wonder and awe and terror." [p. 34] and "When we speak of honesty, in relation to poems, we mean the degree to which and the power with which the generating impulse has been transcribed. Transcribed not transformed. Any attempt to evaluate the honesty of a text must always lead away from that text, and toward intention. This may make an interesting trail, more interesting, very possibly, than the poem. The mistake, in any case, is our failure to separate poetry which sounds like honest speech from honest speech. The earlier mistake is in assuming that there is only one way for poetry to sound." [p. 35]

  • The Forbidden
  • Obstinate Humanity
  • Disruption, Hesitation, Silence [compares the poetry of John Berryman (a poet of distraction and disruption), George Oppen ("part of Oppen's genius is a reluctance to conclude"), and T.S. Eliot (Prufrock as "a masterpiece of avoidance")]
  • Disinterestedness [advocates reading with bias-free receptivity]
  • The Best American Poetry 1993: Introduction
  • The Dreamer and the Watcher
  • Invitation and Exclusion
  • Death and Absence
  • On Impoverishment
  interleaved with 4 brief essays on poets:
  • T.S. Eliot
  • George Oppen
  • Hugh Seidman
  • Stanley Kunitz
• Each essay was previously published in a literary journal.

Time Line

1943.

• Born in New York City (Louise Elisabeth).

1968

• 1st book of poems: Firstborn.

1975

• 2nd book of poems: The House on Marshland.

1976

• 3rd book of poems: The Garden.

1980

• 4th book of poems: Descending Figure.

1983

• Appointed a professor at Williams College, where she taught for over two decades.

1985.

• 5th book of poems: The Triumph of Achilles, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award.

1990

• 6th book of poems: Ararat, which won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.

1992

• 7th book of poems: The Wild Iris.
• Book of essays: Proofs and Theories (1992, paperback reprint 1994)

1993

• Won Pulitzer Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award for The Wild Iris.
• Guest editor of The Best American Poetry: 1993.

1995

• Essays: Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, which won the PEN-Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.

1996

• 8th book of poems: Meadowlands.

1999

• 9th book of poems: Vita Nova, winner of The Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize.
• Elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

2001

• 10th book of poems: The Seven Ages.
• Received Bollingen Prize.

2003

• Began her duties as the Library of Congress's twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
• Linton Weeks (Washington Post Staff Writer) reported Glück saying that when she received the call from the Library of Congress, "to my surprise I didn't hesitate, even though I can't say I was unambivalently delighted. I have very little taste for public forums. ... I thought my life needed to be disturbed and surprised." Weeks also reported that Glück " prizes ordinary life ... [and] was heartened by the knowledge that 'many of the things poet laureates do are optional.' She said she does not like to be photographed." In comparing her poems with those of the prior Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. she said her poems are "probably more brutal, more disturbing, less readily accessible and charming."
• Her powerful long poem "The Prism" (later included in Averno) published in the New Yorker.
• Named as the new judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets (she currently teaches at Yale).

2004

• Her first selection for winner of Yale Series of Younger Poets was the excellent Peter Streckfus' Cuckoo. Glück compared him to Bidart (assemblage; ritual); others compare him to Ashbery and Pound. In her Foreword, she praises his poems for "nonsense and mystery ... mesmerizing beauty ... luminous high-mindedness" and she writes:

  "The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning. It belongs, in literature, to the holy fool and the cryptic sprite; in religion, to the visionary or the seer; in philosophy, to the Sphinx and the Zen master. ... Such art asks, inevitably, a kind of consent of the reader. Or, in Peter Streckfus's unforgettable first book, more active cooperation. What is transacted here between poet and reader has less to do with the reader's being convinced by elegant or passionate argument, and more to do with seduction. And the instrument of our seduction, for once, is not charm but mesmerizing beauty."

2006

• 11th book of poems: the luminous Averno.
• Averno nominated for the National Book Award, and would have been a worthy winner.
• Selected Jay Hopler's Green Squall as winner of Yale Series of Younger Poets.

2008

One of 48 women poets in 100 essential modern poems by women:

100 Essential Modern Poems By Women (2008) edited by Joseph Parisi and Kathleen Welton.

2010

Poem in 2010 Best American Poetry.

Links and Books.

Links and Books.

• Best American Poetry series.
• Best Poems by the Best Poets - Some Lists of Winners.
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of Britain
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of the U.S.A.
• Other Books of Poetry Form.

Related pages: Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and related topics. How to Write Poetry.

Copyright © 2006-2016 by J. Zimmerman, except for the quoted poems. All rights reserved.

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