Louise Gluck
Louise Gluck
Louise Elisabeth Glückis an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 April 1943
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
winter should-have despair
You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.
heart mind trusted
That's why I'm not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind
travel memorable forgotten
What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.
winter thinking earth
I think I can remember being dead. Many times, in winter, I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth?
doors suffering ends
At the end of my suffering/there was a door.
may lasts life-is
The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.
form
The love of form is a love of endings.
loss birth hard
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
wall taken thinking
So you couldn't protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you're free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you're free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
loneliness heart wind
Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
self mind answers
17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other. 18. The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.
mother lying father
As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to the theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came, wouldn't seem a significant change.