On Proofs and Theories: Essay on Poetry by Louise Gluck (Day 2)

Today I read less than I set out to read. I read Gluck’s essays, “On Hugh Seidman,” “The Forbidden,” and “Obstinate Humanity.” One thing that stood out to me was thinking about which of the poets Gluck focused on are still celebrated vs. which were completely new names to me (the book having been published in 1994). For instance, two poets Gluck seemed to admire and think deserved more praise were Hugh Seidman and Robinson Jeffers; I admittedly couldn’t have named a poem by either of them, though I quite enjoyed the passages she quoted in her essays. She also spent quite a bit of time criticizing a poet I had no familiarity with, Linda McCarriston. There were also mentions of a number of people who are frequently anthologized, such as Sharon Olds, Robert Hass, and Carolyn Forche, but reading these sections made me very curious about who will be remembered out of the rising generation. It seems that maybe those who best represent dominant poetics of the period are more likely to be kept around, which is both logical and a bit saddening given how widely aesthetics sensibilities currently range.

The chapter I found most interesting was “The Forbidden,” which discusses the ways that victimhood and revealing of the taboo might be oversimplified by some poets of her generation (specifically Linda McCarriston, whose work I am admittedly unfamiliar with). I suppose I was most interested in this chapter because it deals with a line of writing that I wobble around. Perhaps the most scathing critique she gives is calling it “competing in the previously unpermitted arena of personal shame” (54). She critiques the way many survivors “dissociate the forbidden from all tragic implication while continuing to claim for their efforts the prestige of tragedy” (54). As callous as parts of her criticism seem, I do think she has some good advice about what can make certain poetry collections about surviving trauma/shame feel one note. She raises an issue that I think is helpful:

“What response is solicited when the documenting voice requires that we not, at all moments, its survival (even, in many cases, its survival as a soul improved by this encounter with evil). These voices specify rage and contamination and shame; what they demand, however, is admiration for unprecedented bravery” (54)

I can think of recent books I’ve read, and more or less enjoyed, that might fall into this category of demanding the reader believe the speaker has been improved by their contact with evil and should be applauded for these victories. I think part of Gluck’s criticism is with how fixed the the notion of the reader’s response is in such poems, as well as the emotional journey of the collection. I hope that my own work does not do that; what I can say about traumatic experiences (at least my own) is that they might cause one to be able to better understand others, to be more empathetic and human in a way, but I don’t think they’ve made me a better person nor do I think they are something that can be fully triumphed over. In this way, they resist tidy arcs and fixed revelations. I think that they become a part of you that you have to learn to how to tolerate and negotiate, like an aching joint that acts up unexpectedly.

One of the author’s Gluck criticizes is Sharon Olds, who I have adored for many years (though I would love to hear her talk about her thoughts on line breaks). Gluck discusses Olds’ book The Father, in which Olds’ chronicles the “extreme physical, the unsayable reality” of her father’s death with “sustained scrutiny and fastidious notation of detail” (56). Although these all seem like positive attributes, Gluck notes that Olds “uses her genius for observation to make, repeatedly, the same points, to reach the same epiphanies”(57). Although I am probably never going to be convinced by anyone not to like Sharon Olds, I do think Gluck makes an interesting point about the issue of having too many poems in a collection that have the same epiphanies. There can be something overly-determined feeling about such books, like if you’ve read the first five poems, you’ve basically read the entire collection.