Louise Glück

Notes on Melancholy, part 4

In my first note on melancholy I quoted the following question raised by Jacky Bowring, she asked: How can things that are sorrowful be beautiful? Louise Glück’s First Snow is not a theoretical answer, but a wonderful demonstration of something deeply sorrowful becoming almost unbearably beautiful – First Snow by Louise Glück Like a child, the earth’s going to…

Floating

Louise Glück on creativity Claire Luchette: What are the seeds of your work? Do your poems grow from a feeling you want to convey, or a question you want to ask? Louise Glück: No. I never have the slightest thing in mind. In fact, I am suspicious of my existing ideas, my conscious thoughts and…

Reading at night

I prefer reading poetry in the late evening hours, when my house is at rest, and the world has gone quiet. These days (nights) I’m reading Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück. It is a wonderful collection of texts – some poems, and some texts which might be called prose poems, or meditations. Together these fragments create a strange…

(creative?!???) MESS, or: a state of confusion and disorderliness

I’ve started working on a short essay on Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. the book keeps popping up in my imagination, so I’ve decided to try to write myself through my fascination. As for now I haven’t got any written stuff to show you, but this is what my desk looks like at the moment: in comparison…

For Kim

– who asked for pictures of my books/bookcases I do not think Mrs Woolf would have appreciated it, but it is the truth, and I’d better tell you: There is no door into my new study. Its an open attic, everyone can enter – whenever … At the moment I’m focusing on learning how to write…

This might not read like a typical new year poem, but rather like something coming to an end. But the days are still very short, and the “stimmung” in the text is very recognizable – Twilight All day he works at his cousin’s mill, so when he gets home at night, he always sits at…

Radial Symmetry

Today I’m reading Katherine Larson, it’s an extraordinary experience! The first poem in her collection is called Statuary, it goes like this: . The late cranes throwing their necks to the wind stay somewhere between the place that rain begins and the place that it ends they seem to exist just there above the horizon…