Day 3 on Proofs & Theories by Gluck (“Disruption, Hesitation, and Silence”)

Due to a back injury that is making sitting upright miserable, I thought I would include some of my favorite passages from this chapter. Much of the chapter focuses on defending the lyric — its silences, mystery, and reliance on context — against narrative poems (such as Sharon Olds, for instance). She provides expansive readings of Berryman, Oppen, and Eliot, with slightly less detailed readings of Rilke and Hopkins. She seems disgruntled by the popularity of poets from “the cult of exhaustive detail, of data.” I think it’s really interesting that at this point in time (the book was published in 1994) that narrative was being exalted over lyric; when I was working on MFA (2011–2013), I felt narrative was very much under attack in favor of lyric and more experimental approaches. It’s funny how quickly those waves turn on their heads.