Ignore the headline--the piece isnt about that, and I love Glück. The piece is about poetry criticism: ---- What are all those different words being used for then, I wonder? Are there really that many words for middle-class discontent? Those are real questions I have, not what are commonly called rhetorical ones. And if I seem to be picking on White or on Glück, that’s not my intention. White’s review struck me as typical of the way poetry is discussed in the mainstream press, not unusual, and I just want to tell reviewers of poetry that there’s at least one reader out there who’s mostly less interested in what someone’s poems are about than in what kind of linguistic experiences the poems make out of what they are about. That’s what it would take to get me to start reading a poet whose works are mostly unfamiliar to me. It’s true that Edgar Allan Poe considered the death of a beautiful woman to be “the most poetical topic in the world” but really, it’s not the subject that makes for poetry, it’s the work on language that the subject enables the poet to do. Until a critic can explain how Glück is reworking our language, I’m not ready to start tackling the 634 pages of her oeuvre. But I’m still ready to be enticed. Is there a critic out there who’s willing to try?
Posted on: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 14:55:33 +0000
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