Louise+Glück,+2003-2004


 * Louise Gluck (2003-2004) **

Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently, //Averno// (2006), a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; //The Seven Ages// (2001); and //Vita Nova// (1999), winner of //Boston// //Book Review's// Bingham Poetry Prize and //The New Yorker//'s Book Award in Poetry. In 2004, she published her six-part poem [|"October"] as a chapbook.

Her other books include //Meadowlands// (1996); //The Wild Iris// (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award; //Ararat// (1990), for which she received the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and //The Triumph of Achilles// (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award.

She has also published a collection of essays, //Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry// (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her honors include the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, the MIT Anniversary Medal and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1999 Glück was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. In the fall of 2003, she replaced [|Billy Collins] as the Library of Congress's twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. In 2003, she was announced as the new judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a position she will hold through 2007. She is a writer-in-residence at Yale University.

code Is it winter again, is it cold again, didn't Frank just slip on the ice, didn't he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted
 * ** October (section I) ** ||||  ||

didn't the night end, didn't the melting ice flood the narrow gutters

wasn't my body rescued, wasn't it safe

didn't the scar form, invisible above the injury

terror and cold, didn't they just end, wasn't the back garden harrowed and planted--

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense, in stiff rows, weren't the seeds planted, didn't vines climb the south wall

I can't hear your voice for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is--

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds, weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested? code ||