Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:38:46.312Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Louise Glück's Twenty-First-Century Lyric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Reena Sastri
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines a contemporary poetics that implicitly challenges prevailing critiques of lyric as asocial, monologic, and naively self-expressive. Louise Glück practices a lyric mode whose plainspoken surface and emotional immediacy belie its metalinguistic and metafictional complexity. Her poems' illocutionary structures and their attunement to everyday grammatical nuance convey an understanding of language as situational, context-dependent shared action, an understanding that chimes with the insights of ordinary-language philosophy. The perspectives offered by Glück's work can fruitfully complicate dominant models of lyric and binary narratives of American poetic history that set lyric voice against philosophical ambition and linguistic innovation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 2 , March 2014 , pp. 188 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Print.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Paul B. “Form and History: Reading as an Aesthetic Experience and Historical Act”. Modern Language Quarterly 69.2 (2008): 195–219. Web. 19 July 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashbery, John. A Worldly Country. Manchester: Carcanet, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, J. L. Philosophical Papers. 3rd ed. Ed. Urmson, J. O. and Warnock, G. J. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Intelex Past Masters. Web. 28 Nov. 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Charles. “Semblance.” Content's Dream: Essays, 1975-1984. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001. 34-39. Print.Google Scholar
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Brewster, Scott. Lyric. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? Updated ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Cavell, Stanley. This New yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Albuquerque: Living Batch, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Chiasson, Dan. “The Body Artist: Louise Glück's Collected Poems.” New Yorker 12 Nov. 2012: 86–89. Print.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. “Lyric, History, and Genre.” New Literary History 40 (2009): 879–99. Web. 10 June 2011.Google Scholar
Culler, Jonathan. “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 201–06. Print. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory.” Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. Ed. Erkkila, Betsy and Grossman, Jay. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 62–79. Print.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. 1943. New York: Farrar, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Kermode, Frank. London: Harcourt, 1975. Print.Google Scholar
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. Collected Poems, 1909-1962. London: Harcourt, 1963. 51–76. Print.Google Scholar
Forbes, Deborah. Sincerity's Shadow: Self-Consciousness in British Romantic and Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Gardner, Thomas. Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Glück, Louise. “Ersatz Thought.” Threepenny Review 76 (1999): 14–15. Print.Google Scholar
Glück, Louise. “For a Dollar: Louise Glück in Conversation”. Interview by Dana Levin. American Poet 36 (2009): n. pag. Web. 1 Nov. 2009.Google Scholar
Glück, Louise. Foreword. Cuckoo. By Peter Streckfus. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. ix-xv. Print.Google Scholar
Glück, Louise. Foreword. Frail-Craft. By Jessica Fisher. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. xi-xvii. Print.Google Scholar
Glück, Louise. Foreword. Juvenilia. By Ken Chen. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. vii-xviii. Print.Google Scholar
Glück, Louise. Poems 1962-2012. New York: Farrar, 2012. Print.Google Scholar
Glück, Louise. Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell: Ecco, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Halpern, Nick. Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Halpern, Nick. “Louise Glück's ‘I.‘” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.Google Scholar
Harrison, DeSales. The End of the Mind: The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hedley, Jane. “I'll Tell You Something': Reader-Address in Louise Glück's Ararat Sequence”. Literature Compass 2.1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.Google Scholar
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Virginia. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Johnson, Barbara. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion”. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 28–47. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keller, Lynn. Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women's Exploratory Poetics. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Keniston, Ann. “‘The Fluidity of Damaged Form’: Apostrophe and Desire in Nineties Lyric.” Contemporary Literature 42.2 (2001): 294–324. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keniston, Ann. Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Longenbach, James. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. Ed. Bidart, Frank and Gewanter, David. New York: Farrar, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Miller, Cristanne. “Dickinson's Structured Rhythms.” A Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Loeffelholz, Mary and Smith, Martha Nell. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 391–414. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Cristanne. Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Cristanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012. Print.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Stephen A. Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Müller-Zettelmann, Eva, and Rubik, Margarete. Introduction. Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric. Ed. Müller-Zettelmann, and Rubik, . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 7–17. Print.Google Scholar
“Opposing Terms: A Symposium on the Poetic Limits of Binary Thinking.” Boston Review 6 Dec. 2012: n. pag. Web. 25 Jan. 2013.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “The Changing Face of Common Intercourse: Talk Poetry, Talk Show, and the Scene of Writing.” Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics. Ed. Beach, Christopher. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1998. 77–106. Print.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo”. Critical Inquiry 25.3 (1999): 405–34. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” Boston Review 16 May 2012: n. pag. Web. 13 June 2012.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “Toward a Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context”. PN Review 38.3 (2012): 19–26. Print.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. Twenty-First-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden: Blackwell, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Siobhan. “Elizabeth Bishop and the Ethics of Correspondence”. Modernism/Modernity 19.2 (2012): 343–63. Print.Google Scholar
Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Hughes, Ted. London: Faber, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.Google Scholar
Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riley, Denise. “‘A Voice without a Mouth’: Inner Speech”. Qui Parle 14.1 (2004): 58–104. Print.Google Scholar
Sadoff, Ira. History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2009. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schalkwyk, David. Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sewell, Lisa. Introduction. American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics. Ed. Rankine, Claudia and Sewell, . Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2007. 1–15. Print.Google Scholar
Shepherd, Reginald. Introduction. Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries. Ed. Shepherd, . Denver: Counterpath, 2008. xi-xvii. Print.Google Scholar
Silliman, Ron. Interview by Tom Beckett. Ron Silliman Issue. Ed. Beckett. Spec. issue of Difficulties 2.2 (1985): 34–46. Web. 3 Mar. 2010.Google Scholar
Spahr, Juliana. Introduction. American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Ed. Spahr, and Rankine, Claudia. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2002. 1–17. Print.Google Scholar
Spiegelman, Willard. “Are You Talking to Me?': Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück's The Wild Iris”. Literature Compass 2.1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.Google Scholar
St. John, David. Introduction. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. Ed. Swensen, Cole and St. John. New York: Norton, 2009. xxvii-xxviii. Print.Google Scholar
Swensen, Cole. Introduction. American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. Ed. Swensen, and John, David St. New York: Norton, 2009. xvii-xxvi. Print.Google Scholar
Townsend, Ann. “The Problem of Sincerity: The Lyric Plain Style of George Herbert and Louise Glück”. Shenandoah: Washington and Lee University Review 46.4 (1996): 43–61. Print.Google Scholar
Von Hallberg, Robert. Lyric Powers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warren, Rosanna. Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry. New York: Norton, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Waters, William. Poetry's Touch: On Lyric Address. Cornell UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Winnicott, D. W. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964. Print.Google Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. Print.Google Scholar