American Originality: Essays on Poetry

by Louise Glück

Overview

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A luminous collection of essays from Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our most original and influential poets

Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück’s second book of essays—her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück’s moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection.

From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of “narcissism” and “genius” that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374537463
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/03/2018
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	538,693
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 4.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Montpelier, Vermont.

Table of Contents

1

American Originality 3

American Narcissism 8

Ersatz Thought 23

On Buddenbrooks 36

2

Story tellers 41

On Realism 55

The Culture of Healing 58

3 Ten Introductions

Author's Note 63

In The Surgical Theatre Dana Levin 67

The Clerk's Tale Spencer Reece 73

The Cuckoo Peter Streckfus 80

Crush Richard Siken 88

Green Squall Jay Hopler 97

Frail-Craft Jessica Fisher 107

The Earth in the Attic Fady Joudah 117

It is Daylight Arda Collins 128

Juvenilia Ken Chen 141

Radial Symmetry Katherine Larson 153

4

On Revenge 167

Estrangement 171

Fear of Happiness 181

Editorial Reviews

"When one of the nation’s great living poets sets her observational eye on the state of the American letters—poetry specifically—it is for all of us to pay attention . . . Glück is an essayist at once generous and sharp, and her insights into craft, classic American poetry, and the souls of the poets, are essential reading." —Jonny Diamond, LitHub

From the Publisher

Fans of Glück's own poems will recognize her trademark severity. In her extreme focus and clipped, uncompromising sentences, Glück recalls no one so much as Susan Sontag. Like Sontag, Glück assumes her readers know the texts under consideration—she often omits the customary quotations critics use to illustrate their points. Yet she writes with such mesmerizing authority that her claims feel unimpeachable. Unlike Sontag, Glück has not cultivated the ability to write about any subject; she confines herself to the practice of poetry in America. Yet her thought accommodates extrapolation in many directions, toward broader aspects of American identity…in the guise of a poetry critic, Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience.

The New York Times Book Review - Craig Morgan Teicher

★ 03/15/2017
Celebrated poet Glück's second book of essays is a study of contemporary American poetry. It explores the lingering and sometimes overwhelming influence of such figures as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, as well as offering a generous introduction to several poets who are probably unknown to most readers. These introductions offer an open window on the current state of poetry and allow us the opportunity to peer inside, with the help of an intelligent and engaging guide. Glück's originality isn't so much in how she sees but in what she sees, and her openness permits her to observe things readers might gloss over. In particular, the essay "American Narcissism" is a masterpiece of critical insight, finding its most powerful focus in the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a moment of pure brilliance. Without denigrating Rilke's many gifts, Glück connects the voyeuristic trend in American poetry (a tendency to prize "fastidious aesthetics" and "the exposure of the secret") to his influence. VERDICT Seemingly free of literary prejudice or poetic theory, Glück looks at poetry with open eyes, seeking that which catches her off guard or excites her soul. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]—Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

Library Journal

2017-01-10
A celebrated poet collects some recent essays on theory, craft, and other poets.In her second essay collection, after Proofs and Theories (1994), Glück (English and Creative Writing/Yale Univ.; Faithful and Virtuous Night, 2014, etc.), who has won about every major poetry prize, delivers a generous variety of pieces. Some deal with the current state of American poetry; some are admiring assessments of her fellow poets (Emily Dickinson, Robert Pinsky, Stephen Dobyns, Dan Chiasson); and one group of 10 comprises introductions to first books by new poets, artists whose work Glück has evaluated for various writing contests. These pieces, unsurprisingly, are uniformly laudatory ("mastery of tone and diction"; "haunting, elusive, luminous")—though, as the essays clearly reveal, the poets themselves are hardly uniform. These pieces also feature many quoted passages. Of course, the more heavily theoretical pieces will appeal primarily to Glück's fellow poets and to the literati. The author observes, for example, that recent poetry "affords two main types of incomplete sentences: the aborted whole and the sentence with gaps. In each case, the nonexistent, the unspoken, becomes a focus; ideally, a whirling concentration of questions." Near the end are more personal essays that deal with Glück's childhood, her years in psychoanalysis, and her insights about the varying effects of happiness and despair on poets. She convincingly argues that happiness is the more beneficial, productive emotion, for it does not deny the writer access to the dark side. Another entertaining and revelatory piece explores the author's childhood revenge fantasies and how, uniquely, they accelerated her journey into the world of poetry. And there are smiles (maybe even a guffaw or two) in some of her observations—e.g., that Rilke could be "oddly masturbatory." A love of poetry—of the poet's life—infuses these essays and brings a glow to the theoretical and a bright flame to the personal.

Kirkus Reviews