Singing Praises for Louise Glück's "Song"

So already, in the first line of her poem "Song,"* Louise Glück talks about beautiful porcelain bowls made by an artisan she is getting to know. The bowls are white and whole, not green and broken and repaired with gold, like the one depicted on the cover of a greeting card I once bought. If anything or anyone in Glück's poetry has been broken, patched up, and enhanced by its own history never denied, it's the poet herself, who is often present in her own poems, including this new one. I love this poem. I'd also like to know why it's called "Song."

First of all, a warning: don't look to Glück's poetry to offer healing in the form of golden balms and salves to be applied to wounds that we humans typically experience--and that we often inflict on ourselves, intentionally or unintentionally. Rather, the gold that gleams in Glück's poems illuminates, sometimes harshly.  

"Nunnery" by Scott Ketcham

Glück is neither markedly cruel nor particularly compassionate as she compels us--and herself--to see. Candid, thoughtful, intent on not fooling herself, she's a Virgil figure who walks in darkness beside us, her Dante-like readers who may have been wounded, may be questioning the "truths" that have guided us, may have experienced or be experiencing hell--or the threat of it.** Minimally, we want to survive. Ideally, we want to be and feel truly alive during what remains of our lives. Yes, Louise Glück is very concerned about mortality, as are many of her older readers.

Compared to many of Glück's poems, "Song" is gentle and bright, though equally focused on the challenge of being truly alive. I believe it's a pandemic poem, since in the first stanza, the speaker immediately identifies the problem of getting material objects to someone else when humans are separated by distance that must be maintained:

Leo Cruz makes the most beautiful white bowls;
I think I must get some to you
but how is the question
in these times

"Aquatint 3" by Sylvia Plimack Mangold***

The theme of limiting separation, probably pandemic-caused, continues in the second stanza, in which the grasses**** about which Leo Cruz is teaching the speaker can, at the moment, only be seen in a book:

 

He is teaching me
the names of the 

     desert grasses;
I have a book
since to see the 

    grasses is impossible

In the next two stanzas, when the speaker contradicts a viewpoint Leo asserts, he asks that she leave the door open to the possibility that he's right:

Leo thinks the things man makes
are more beautiful
than what exists in nature

and I say no.
And Leo says
wait and see.

Human-made things as more beautiful than what occurs in nature? Talk about an assertion that could get an artisan kicked out of a lot of gatherings of those who consider beauty and nature synonymous.

"Edged Sod" by Scott Ketcham****

But that's the kind of thing Glück routinely does: forces her readers to reconsider opinions and interpretations that may have solidified into truths and beliefs. Many of us know the Greek myth about Hades' abduction of Persephone to the Underworld, where, according to the deal that her mother Demeter and Hades strike, she must live for half of every year. And many of us have been taught to view it as a tragic tale of mother-daughter grief and longing. But Glück's poem "Persephone the Wanderer" asks us to consider another way that Persephone might feel about Demeter: 

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter. (18)*****

Dark, direct stuff indeed, this characterization of this mother-daughter relationship, maybe any mother-daughter relationship. Glück's poems often explore the "other interpretations" of Greek myths; I chose this particular one because the COVID-19 pandemic has, to some degree, relegated all of us to a kind of bounded underworld existence, a chronic exile from the experience of being fully and freely alive.

So back to "Song"--and another way it challenges the expectations of longtime Glück readers. Though Glück assumes the Virgil role in many of her poems, Leo Cruz is clearly the teacher and guide in this one. Yet again, in the fifth stanza, she takes her cues from him, and learns fast, without self-reproach. 

We make plans

to walk the trails 

    together.******

When, I ask him,

when? Never again:

that is what we do 

    not say.

Ever looking beyond the present to enlivening, intense experience, wanting to plan for it, the speaker pushes to know "when"--the poem uses the word twice to underscore her impatient hunger. Quickly she learns not to ask again, though we're not sure precisely how. 

Then, in the sixth through eighth stanzas, she tells what else Leo is teaching her:

He is teaching me
to live in imagination:

a cold wind
blows as I cross the desert;
I can see his house in the distance;
smoke is coming from the chimney

That is the kiln, I think;
only Leo makes porcelain in the desert

It's the colon after "imagination" that clues us in: in her mind's eye, the speaker walks across the desert, crossing the distance between her and the bowl-maker defined by and immersed in his craft that yields those beautiful white bowls. 

She must have shared this vision with Leo, because in the ninth stanza, just one line long, he responds, perhaps a little patronizingly, perhaps just observationally, 

Ah, he says, you are dreaming again

--as if to remind her of her propensity to yearn for what's beyond the present moment.

Finally, in the poem's tenth and final stanza, she asserts herself, claims for herself the right to dream, to imagine beyond the present: 

And I say then I’m glad I dream
the fire is still alive

To discover that the fire within is still alive: what isn't to sing about? And isn't that what we all want during this pandemic--the confirmation that despite our too-frequent feelings of being hemmed in, sealed off, mired in loss and despair, we haven't lost our capacities to feel alive, to hope, and to imagine the future?

I suspect that Louise Glück entitled this poem "Song" not just because of her gratitude for Leo's friendship and different way of being in the world, but for the opportunity their relationship gave her to reclaim and assert the power of dreaming in her own life. We're not required to become the people whose lives we learn from.

Still, questions remain for me. Did Leo know that the speaker feared that her inner fire had been extinguished by the pandemic, or something else? Is to dream different than to "live in imagination"? Does dreaming lead to imagining, and/or vice versa? And is a poem a song because someone says it is? Now, for the first time, I find myself asking one more question: is Leo Cruz real or imagined?

I still love this poem--the relationship central to it; its stunning images of perfect white bowls, desert grasses, the house in the desert with smoke rising from its chimney; the challenge it presents of learning to live both at a distance and in the moment; the assertion of warmth and life at its end. But I'm still baffled by its title.

I do have a final thought, though, one based on what Glück says in one section of "October," the first poem in Averno*******:

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful. . . .

They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish. 

 

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly

in anticipation of silence.

The ear gets used to them. (11)********

To my ear, Louise Glück is singing a new song in "Song." Desolation and anguish are not reigning as she responds to Leo Cruz, whether he's real or imagined. She's alive and pressing on. I needed that.

* You can also read this poem in the October 19, 2020 print edition of The New Yorker. 

** "Nunnery" by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/180670325537 

*** "Aquatint 3" by Sylvia Plimack Mangold: http://www.parasolpress.com/parasol-editions/mangold_sylvia/Mangold_Sylvia_Plimack_Aquatint3.html

**** Edged Sod" by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/185237119582

***** Glück Louise. (2006). "Persephone the Wanderer". In Averno (pp. 16-19). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

******  Burt, S. (2012, January 25). Day of Oz [web log]. https://sdburtonlife.wordpress.com/page/4/.  

******* Book images embedded in Harris, E. A. (2020, October 8). Here Are Some Memorable Lines from Louise Glück. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-poems.html. 

******** Glück Louise. (2006). "October". In Averno (pp. 5-15). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.