Louise Glück: "Landscape" and Other Poems

Louise Glück died on October 13th, 2023. This entry was published in 2020, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, now it has become a tribute to her memory and to her poetry.

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Poet Louise Glück has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Poetry must be read out loud to appreciate its sound and its music, the unique sound and music of a language, in this case English, which cannot be faithfully translated into any other language.

Below you can watch a YouTube video of Louise Glück reading out loud several of her poems at a Lannan literary event.  After an introduction by Peter Streckfus, the poet reads "Mock Orange" (10:17), then two poems from her book "The Wild Iris" (10:29).  Next, two more poems from "Averno" (14:03): "Telescope" (14:27) and "Landscape", which is introduced at 15:50 and recited at 17:26.  Then, Ms Glück goes on to read two poems from "A Village Life" (29:24), and. finally, the poetic rendition ends with two texts form "Faithful & Virtous Night" (43:11).

You can read the words of "Landscape" while you listen to the poem on this link from "The Threepenny Review", you should listen to the poem several times before you can glimpse some kind of meaning.  Nevertheless, poetry is more than a factual message, poetry is the sound of words, poetry is tempo, so, you can enjoy, straightaway, the rhythmical patterns of English, the articulation of consonants, the quality and length of the vowels that the poet recites, slowly and carefully -which we tend to turn a deaf ear to, when we are engaged in our everyday communication exchanges- and that auditive perception is worthwhile in itself, even more so, if you are a mystified learner of a foreign language. After listening to the poet, you can try to recite the poem yourself, paying mindful attention to the pronunciation of phonemes, words and sentences -a pronunciation class in quest for poetic beauty! This poem is accessible to C1 students for the lexis is rather easy: [the sun] sets, bare, chestnut, quilt, damp, to trail, to rush, to strain the leash, path, sunset, precipice, to call out, faintly, twilight, to untie [his horse], to stir, to float, propitious [time], demure inviting [sounds], to vanish, to bleach, [an image] to fade, to set fire to [a field], wheat, tinder, for [the farmer's] sake, char, [a field] parched, failure, abiding, a memento, soil, a slot, complacent, harsh, obsolete, shallow, to soothe, the earth, to defeat, accurate, shelter, thickly, steadily, [sure] footing, a premonition.

If you want to read an introduction to the poetry of Louise Glück, you can follow this link to "The Poetry Foundation", where you will find an article with a dense collection of review extracts which is recommended for Experts, above C2 level.  Here you will find a lot of information about the recent Nobel Prize winner and about her poems.

One article that may strike you in "The Poetry Foundation" is this interview to Boston-based composer Harriett Staff, who has set the text of "Averno" to music. She describes the process of turning text into music in these terms: "To be set as music easily, the text needs to be concise. There has to be some sense of rhythm - even a single phrase that has a strong sense of long and short beats. And then the vowels need to be longer and the consonants leaning towards softer sounds, 'l', 'm', 'n', with fewer hard consonants. I don't think too much about meaning at the beginning. When I find a poem that seems to feel as if it could be music, I look for a single line that speaks to me musically, I memorise it, and I start saying it with various emphases and melodic lines. When something begins to emerge that sounds natural and musical, I write it down. Usually it is both melodic and rhythmic." This interview is suitable for C1 students.