Louise Glück •  John McAuliffe writes: Louise Glück’s remarkable poems have been published in Great Britain across her entire writing life, initially by Anvil and, since 1996, by Carcanet. It has been a recurring pleasure at Carcanet to publish her for three decades.

Greeting her classic 1996 collection The Wild Iris, Helen Vendler caught something of her poetry’s fierce, brilliant independence: ‘Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither “confessional” nor “intellectual” in the usual senses of those words, which are often thought to represent two camps in the life of poetry’.

Glück would continue to steer that original path through the great books that followed, including Averno and A Village Life and, most recently, her first, fable-like fiction, Marigold and Rose (2022), as well as Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021).

In her essay ‘The Education of the Poet’, Glück wrote, ‘The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden’. For half a century, Glück listened hard for hidden voices and found images which speak both to personal crises and perennial mysteries, an endeavour recognised in 2020 by the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation declared, ‘if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet. Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.’  

One of this candid poet’s most striking lines, from her poem ‘Nostos’, a Greek word for homecoming, speaks to the astonishing recoveries her poems enact for her readers: ‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.’

Alongside the 2020 Nobel Prize, her other awards include the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.


Daisy Fried writes: I hear that Louise Glück has died. A Great poet, great with a capital G. I knew her a little (not well at all) and my own writing, and sense of myself as a poet, are the better for this, and certainly because of her work.

It’s funny to think of how as a very young woman I didn’t understand Glück’s austerities – young people often don’t read well across temperamental differences, and I was no exception. But I began to learn what it was about her as I grew up a little. Her rigour, her astonishments. Over the years I’ve read her pretty constantly and taught her often, especially Meadowlands and, last year, her last book of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective. When she won the Nobel, I thought: ‘oh, yes, perfect’.

I first met her when American Poetry Review brought her to Philadelphia to give a master class, a class for high school teachers, a reading and a lecture. I was in that master class. She only workshopped three poems out of the ten submitted by the ten members of the workshop. She said that she thought it was more valuable for all of us if she went deeply into a few poems, rather than run superficially over all of the poems – and she was right. My husband Jim’s was one of the poems she workshopped in class. She invited everyone else to make an appointment to meet with her during the week she was in town. Obviously I took her up on this. She gave me interesting advice that I believe I didn’t end up taking – but it was smart advice. It was just that I decided I had different aims from those that advice was aimed at. This too taught me something about conversations about poems, how there can be all kinds of good advice but you have to discover in it your own aims and your own temperament. She also told me that if I revised the poem I could send it to her. I remember that she said she did not promise to write back to me about it but she did promise to read it. This too was important to me: that honesty, that clear giving and also giving of boundaries. I doubt she ever bullshitted anyone ever. That’s rare in the poetry world, and something to emulate. She was quite well known and in demand by then, and this was a big generosity.

A little while after that, I entered a first book prize she judged, and did not win, but apparently was one of a handful of people she wrote to after the prize. What she said to me: that I had come close but that she didn’t think the book was quite ready yet. She was, of course, right, and as a result I revised and cut and added. The next year my book did win a publication prize.

Final anecdote. The Threepenny Review, where she’d been publishing for years, and where by then I’d also published several times, was having an anniversary party in New York City, and I went to it. Perhaps I was living in Princeton that year, on the Hodder. She was reading at the party. So was Robert Pinsky, I recall. I remember him reading a poem by Thom Gunn. Maybe Thom had just died. I’m not sure. Anyway at the after party, I was feeling rather like a junior member of the poetry world, quite shy, and I remember Robert lifting up Louise’s coat to put it on her shoulders and while he was doing that, Louise spotting me halfway across the room and calling out ‘Daisy Fried, your poems are getting so good!’ That was it, but that was when I felt like I was a real poet and it put me at ease.

These are not very significant stories. I remember going to her readings a number of times, and one particular Q&A, maybe at Bryn Mawr, when she gave some advice about revision, wherein she said that with drafts she wasn’t happy with sometimes she would take the ending of the draft and put it in the middle of the poem and then keep on writing from there. This blew my head off, poets. I’ve passed that suggestion along (with credit) ever since. It doesn’t always work, but it often does.

That’s all. I’m so sorry her voice is now silent.

Poundian •  Michael Alexander, the poet, Poundian and major scholar of old English, died in October. Until his retirement, he was a Professor of English Literature at St Andrews University. He translated the Penguin Classics Beowulf, edited The Earliest English Poems and The Canterbury Tales: The First Fragment. His critical study The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. He also wrote A History of Old English Literature and Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England. For Anvil Press he translated the Old English Riddles, the secular portion of the celebrated Exeter Book. This is number forty-five:

I have heard of something hatched in a corner:
It thrusts, rustles, raises its hat.
A bride grabbed at that boneless thing,
Handled it proudly: a prince’s daughter
Covered that swelling creature with her robe.

It is hard to work out the answer to number seventy-five: ‘I saw a woman sit alone’. Most readers will have worked out that number forty-five is not what it seems to be. It will finally turn into a loaf but at this stage it is – dough.

Diego Roel •  The Argentinian poet Diego Roel has received the thirty-sixth Loewe Award for Poetry – one of the most significant international awards for poetry – for his book Los cuadernos perdidos de Robert Walser (The lost notebooks of Robert Walser). It is a generous prize, of €30,000, and it received 2,302 submissions from forty-four countries, the bulk of them from Spain and Latin America. Roel’s book draws on German, French and English Romantic literature, Walser being the qualifier and unifier of what the judges described as an exceptionally consistent and coherent single work. The lost notebook form manages to bring together elements of epistle, pensée, reflection, and fragments that recall haikus.

The Y •  92NY, the 92nd Street Y, has ‘paused’ (temporarily halted) its literary series, having cancelled an event by an author critical of Israel. 92NY has been one of the key literary resources for international and new American writing. They pulled the event with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen out of concern over his public comments. The event took place in a bookshop in downtown Manhattan, without the Y’s involvement. As a result, several writers scheduled to speak at the Y withdrew, and some of the staff of the Unterberg Poetry Center (which has hosted writers including Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison) resigned. Unfortunate timing: 92NY is celebrating its 150th anniversary – having been founded as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, its mission to serve ‘the social and spiritual needs of the American Jewish community’.

On Hold •  Poetry magazine, in Chicago, sent out an anonymous message on 2 November to ‘Our Communities’, ‘In response to discussions around a recent editorial decision’. The language used is unspecific, cautious, neutral, attempting to disappear into the news it is revealing and concealing at the same time. Clearly a committee, or AI pretending to be a committee, is responsible for the pious drafting. ‘We at the Poetry Foundation are saddened and deeply disturbed by the humanitarian crisis and ongoing violence in Palestine and Israel. While we believe in the power of words to transform lives, it is not a practice of the Poetry Foundation to insert itself when it cannot add to the conversation or may divert attention away from the work being done by those directly impacted and involved.’ Then we get to the meat of the matter. ‘Staff’ (no names, because ‘staff’ is nameless) ‘had scheduled a review of a poetry collection to be published on October 9, which included a discussion of the reviewer’s and poet’s identities as anti-Zionist Jewish writers. Because of the events that began on October 7, a decision was made’ (note the passive voice) ‘in the immediate aftermath to postpone publication to be sensitive to those directly impacted by the violence and avoid exposing both writers to potential backlash. Staff’ (again) ‘informed the review author’ (who also remains anonymous) ‘that we would put the piece on hold temporarily, to which they initially agreed; as conversations with the author continued, they informed us that they would be withdrawing the piece and pitching it elsewhere. We respect the author’s decision, and let them know that they could proceed as they wished.’ Having clearly suppressed an item intended for publication, the statement goes on to declare that, ‘The Poetry Foundation does not censor poets or dictate what topics they might discuss while writing for, recording with, or performing at the Foundation. It’s unfortunate that this was how the interactions were interpreted and that it generated misinformation and misunderstandings within our communities.’ It is reassuring to learn that ‘We at the Poetry Foundation’ (staff?) ‘will continue to uplift work being done by those who raise their voices against oppression. We maintain our mission to foster spaces for all to create, experience, and share poetry, and we are grounded by our values of sharing, collaboration, equity, access, innovation, and growth.’ Uplift, foster spaces for all (with certain exceptions). The public statement is signed by ‘The Poetry Foundation’.

Funding Crisis •  Several literary magazines have reported difficulties around funding. The White Rev­iew, co-founded by publisher Jacques Testard, announced in September that it would ‘go on indefinite hiatus’ because Arts Council funding had not been awarded. The author Julia Armfield declared, ‘The White Review was astonishingly important to me and to so many other writers at the beginning of our careers and throughout’. Bad Form, run by Amy Mae Baxter, announced last month that it would cease online publication. Baxter told the Guardian: ‘The UK’s literary magazine scene is crumbling due to rising print costs. I had to announce that I couldn’t do it any more. The cost of printing magazines has grown astronomically. The cost of Royal Mail postage to ship the print issues has gone up. Even X, formerly known as Twitter, has announced its plans to start charging us to use its service, which would be a critical blow.’ The Cardiff Review announced its demise in October and Gal-Dem – after eight years – folded its tent last April. Our days are numbered…