Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry

Literary Review, Spring, 1996 by Reamy Jansen

Louise Gluck, NJ: The ECCO Press, 1994.

LOUISE GLUCK PRESENTS HERSELF as a reader speaking to those I have heard" in Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry. Often operating declaratively -- "In Williams, loneliness is a song" -- these sixteen essays are suited to their eccentric, scientific-sounding title, rebelliously putting proofs first and tying them to theory through the knot of her ampersand. As with her poetry (with the insistent, observing "I," say, of "Mock Orange"), there is a heightened spokenness to her prose, and we are lucky to overhear her declarations.

Gluck's project is two-fold. She offers an evaluative vocabulary for the reading of poetry, along with an exaltation of poets -- George Oppen, John Berryman, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and, amazingly, Robinson Jeffers, among others -- whose work she values for what is often "unsaid," a quality "analogous to the unseen . . . to the power of ruins." Both concerns are illuminated through autobiographical glimpses of her growth as a poet. Some essays, such as her first, "The Education of the Poet," place her before us as forthrightly as her use here of the definite article. She traces her drive to be a poet of note to as far back as the precocious verse of a five-year-old, Long Island girl with a love of syntax and inversion,

If kitty cats liked roastbeef bones

And doggies lapped up milk;

From an almost-total recall of past work (and I wish that she had more to say here about the nature of poetic memory), Gluck recounts the "steady, upward labor" of becoming a writer, with its need for "stamina," attendant silences, desolation, and "temporary darkness." She comes before us now as the seasoned conductor of the multivocal The Wild Iris, claiming proudly in "Witchgrass," "I constitute the field." At her best, her own speakers have the emotive and intellectual pull that make "the single reader an elite." Hearing, then, is the core of her metaphysic. It is Stanley Kunitz, her great teacher and "companion spirit" -- never far off-stage in these essays -- who became her model of the ideal listener, "the first human being by whom I felt entirely heard." Any number of these contributions have good things to say about how poets and their poems present themselves to being read and heard. What this particular poet learns to value is the power of intelligence, "how the mind conducts itself" in the service of creating a self.

Not surprisingly, the intense engagements of Gluck's poetic practice have left her relatively unaffected by our often overly-Frenchified post-structural vocabularies. Instead, she essays a series of broad terms, embracing some, while upbraiding others she sees as cant, such as honesty, courage, and sincerity (shades of Lionel Trilling here). Ultimately, her judgment derives from what she hears as good-old-fashioned poetic intent in the lines before her and which she presents to her readers as touchstones. And, for the most part, she convincingly displays her power of hearing in crisp, insightful readings of the poets I've already mentioned (offering a loyal and intelligent defense of the voices in Eliot's "Prufrock" and "Ash Wednesday" that will send many of us back to his work). While similar to "the simple vocabulary" that is so central to the nature of Gluck's poetic wager, the risk of valorizing "good" words, such as truth, disinterestedness, intelligence, and mind and self is that they can quickly mutate into the lead weights she has just so convincingly jettisoned. "Voice," for example, which as a teacher of writing I would like to see take a long rest at the bottom of the sea, is for Gluck still inspirited.

By voice I mean the style of thought, for which a style of

speech -- the clever grafts and borrowings, the habitual gestures

scattered like clues in the lines -- never convincingly substitutes.

We fall back on that term, voice, for all its insufficiencies;

it suggests, at least, the sound of an authentic being.

She "loves the sentence as a unit" and uses them with a nuanced wholeness of thought and feeling to invest her lexicon with value. Only rarely does she sound a tractarian.

Gluck's aesthetics seem part of the general yearning to find solid, stable evaluative terms, ones that will stand securely in opposition to the problematizings and ever-shifting indeterminacies of post modernism. There is a pleasing Arnoldian feel to much of what is known and thought here. Gluck, though, appeals to us not as a reactionary (which is rarely true of Arnold, either), but as a writer constantly in reaction, "trying to undermine the known with intelligent questions." In doing so, she points us to the light.