09 October 2020 - Nobel Prize in literature awarded to American poet Louise Glück
Louise Glück Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature
Alexandra Alter and Alex Marshall (The New York Times, 08/10/2020)
The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded on Thursday to Louise Glück, one of America’s most celebrated poets, for writing “that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
The award was announced at a news conference in Stockholm.
Glück, whose name rhymes with the word “click,” has written numerous poetry collections, many of which deal with the challenges of family life and growing older. They include “The Wild Iris,” for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” about mortality and grief, from 2014. She was named the United States’ poet laureate in 2003.
Nobel reminds us why Glück's poetry matters now
Richie Hofmann (CNN, 08/10/2020)
In spring, as I was preparing to teach my poetry course, remotely and online, in the first months of the pandemic, I decided to scrap my syllabus and to teach books that had changed me utterly, as a person and as a writer -- books I have carried with me through the years, from apartment to apartment in tattered copies, books that have grown and changed with me.
The first day of class was the first day of spring. We read Louise Glück's "The Wild Iris," a book of poems written in the language of flowers.
Louise Glück: where to start with an extraordinary Nobel winner
Fiona Sampson (The Guardian, 08/10/2020)
I have been reading Louise Glück for more than 20 years, longer than the many poets whose star has risen and waned in the meantime; longer than I’ve been writing poetry. Perhaps this is why I’m so moved and excited by today’s announcement that the 77-year old American has won the Nobel prize in literature.
But I think it’s much more than this. The 12 collections (and two chapbooks) of poetry that Glück has published to date vary enormously in style and theme, from the domestic and familial stories of her first books, 1968’s aptly-titled Firstborn and her breakthrough second collection The House on Marshland (1975), to the fabular and increasingly philosophic writing of later work like Averno (2006) – named for the entrance to the Classical underworld – and her most recent collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). But what unites all this work is a quality of lucid, calm attention. You read a passage by Glück and think, Ah yes, of course, this is how it is. She has the extraordinary writer’s gift of making clear what is, outside the world of her poem, complex.
How Louise Glück, Nobel Laureate, Became Our Poet
Dan Chiasson (The New Yorker, 08/10/2020)
It was still the fly’s fifteen minutes when, into the Twitter storm of Emily Dickinson-meets-Mike Pence jokes (“I heard a fly buzz—when I lied—”), there interposed the news from Stockholm: Louise Glück had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Right on cue, you saw the limits of the written word. I tweeted, “whhhhhaaaaaatttttt.” Others whose life calling it is to manage language were similarly eloquent. The novelist Brandon Taylor wrote “oh. my. fucking. god. oh my god. ohhhhh my god.” There were multiple context-free “holy shit” ’s. Tweets referred to, but couldn’t embody, the emotions: several writers reported that they were crying. My own emotions hadn’t arrived yet at whatever their final form would be. (They still haven’t.) I ran into our front yard to attempt to hail my wife’s car as she and my two sons headed out of the driveway, on the way to the bus. I was too late. I shouldn’t have stopped to pull on pants.