Louise Glück is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet that is featured in the October issue of “Poets & Writers.” If you don’t read the magazine, you might want to consider starting — it is full of all that might interest any writer…
William Giraldi (author and teacher) interviewed Louise in her Cambridge Massacussetts home. The focus of the piece is on how to create original work. Worth the time to read and I won’t summarize here. I do want to point out a line in the beginning of the article that another writer (the wise and venerable Dani Shapiro, who I’ve written about before) pointed out to me:
“The facts of any life are impotent and ineffectual until literature intercedes, until it takes hold of those facts and twists them into the light, casting a refraction that allows us to glimpse them anew.”
Wise words to remember as we write.
Here is a poem that is timely and shows Louise Glück‘s powerful use of words to drive emotion and dread.
All Hallows
By Louise Glück
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
“All Hallows” by Louise Glück, from The First Four Books of Poems. Copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1995 by Louise Glück. Used by the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, www.harpercollins.com.
Source: The First Four Books of Poems (The Ecco Press, 1995); Poetry Foundation
