Last week, on Friday the 13th, Nobel laureate Louise Glück, wonderful poet and friend, died at the age of 80. Louise edited The Best American Poetry 1993, and the experience of working closely with her— primarily by old-fashioned mail and the occasional phone call – was unforgettable. She took on the job despite a natural inclination to remain “on the sidelines, preferably the very front of the sidelines.” In a moment of moral clarity characteristic of Louise, she recognized that “continuous refusal to expose my judgment to public scrutiny seemed vanity and self-protection.” When the year began, Louise clamored for literary magazines, “like a person in a restaurant banging the table for service,” in her words. They came, so many you could fill a small office with them.
Louise proved herself to be a peerless close reader of poems, and when I said this to her, she, usually distrustful of compliments, seemed genuinely touched. She chose the contents of the volume with “the generosity on which exacting criticism depends.” And she paid me the compliment of treating me like a partner in the enterprise; her decisions were final, but she welcomed discussion, and it was fun exchanging views. The book contains great poems: A. R. Ammons’s “Garbage,” John Ashbery’s “Baked Alaska.” W. S. Merwin’s “The Stranger,” the excerpt from Mark Strand’s Dark Harbor that appeared in The New Republic. The book was daring: there were outstanding poems by a truly diverse group of poets, if by “diverse” we mean a variety of means, tones, metaphors, forms, voices, and visions. We had Charles Bukowski, Adrienne Rich, and John Updike at their best; Billy Collins and Denise Duhamel before readers were familiar with their names; exceptional work from Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Jane Kenyon, Ron Padgett, James Tate; marvelous posthumous poems by Tim Dlugos and Laura Riding.
In a biographical note written for the Nobel Prize committee, Louise wrote that growing up she was good at school, not so good at “the social world,” and that during adolescence she felt “ostracized” everywhere but summer camp. As a student at Columbia she came under the influence of Stanley Kunitz, who championed her work. His “endorsement of high ambition” continued to inspire her, though there was a “there was a deep fissure” with her erstwhile mentor when she strove to banish figurative language from the poems in her 1990 book Ararat. It signaled a new direction for her, and it was precisely the poems in Ararat and in the volume that succeeded it, The Wild Iris, that made me feel Louise was writing the best poems of her life and that we would be lucky if she agreed to take the helm of the 1993 edition of The Best American Poetry.
I want to honor her memory by posting her poem “Vespers,” which Charles Simic chose for the 1992 volume in the series:
Vespers
In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.
from The Wild Iris (1992)
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Author: The Best American Poetry
