There's a poignant moment somewhere in At The Dance, but Louis Gluck's drifting, shapeless, monotonic style effectively obscures it. She is an outstanding example of the sort of poet who has charmed the chronically introverted and the assortment of over-thinkers who love to think they have a rich interior life but who can't really make it of any use; rather than measure among the experiences she's had and decide what carries the most weight and value among them, we are handed , over and over, a series of lumpy reminiscences that resemble a long gaze into a an unkept house; nothing gets thrown away , every item has equal value, and the narrative , such as it is, lacks any animation. Gluck loves to talk, but is hesitant, it seems, to create a hierarchy of signifiers that would create a momentum toward what she wanted us to assume was an inevitable irony.

This is a droning piece, and what ought to have been a cleverly constructed series of parallels between the the protocols of dance, the rituals of attraction and the surrendering and reacquisition of power in interpersonal relationships is static instead, at best the the static-like rip of Velcro jacket being slowly pulled open.

By smell, by feel—a man would approach a woman,
ask her to dance, but what it meant was
will you let me touch you, and the woman could say
many things, ask me later, she could say, ask me again.
Or she could say no, and turn away,
as though if nothing but you happened that night
you still weren't enough, or she could say yes, I'd love to dance
which meant yes, I want to be touched.

Gluck opts for a summing up of the situation, a quick application of the story's moral, a conspicuous working of the old saw that when a women means no, she really means yes. Something wonderfully twisted here might have emerged if she had hacked away at the talky qualifications around the poem's main points and pushed harder toward the edge, talking about how women and men cause hurt and are hurt in turn by misreadings of intent and gesture. But what Gluck had here was a small poem, a minor sigh of regret in later life, the impression that strikes you when you're preparing for the day in front of you , or when you stop to catch your day. It is a slight insight into what had done in the awkwardness of maturing, but the scale of this thing, not epic length, not Ashberyesque in density , is, all the same, too much for this slight conceit. What might have been intriguing would be a juxtaposition of the narrator's current situation and the anecdote she's chosen, with a judicious use of the telling detail, the image that can stand alone, unadorned , which could contrast with an equally effective image . This is how one produces resonance that carry on beyond the page, and this is among the things that distinguishes poetry from the linear inclinations of typical prose. This is typical prose that requires an editor's blue pencil.

Ted,

Though my overall estimate of Glück's poetry is much higher than yours, I feel about this poem as I did about her previous one from a month or two back. It lacks the reticent spareness that, in her best work, surrounds what is said with a penumbra of tacit suggestion. The "village" sequence (have read other parts of it in The New Yorker) is too garrulous--the energy leaks out of the poems as they keep on talking. Which is to say that in this case, I more or less agree with you.

The voice of these poems is choral, not lyric. They are concerned not with what one person says in one private lyric situation but with what people at large say. They need to go on past the constraints of lyric compression in order to nest personal speech in public speech, public life.

To belabor them for failures of lyric concision, for 'garulity,' misreads them by misunderstanding their aims.

Judges are judged by their judgments and readers are read by their readings.

I think it's less about misunderstanding the aims than that the poet's aim was bad to begin with. Not every poem requires that we know the theory before we "get" what the writer was getting at; to insist that a reader needs to appreciate what Gluck intended to do with this piece strongly suggests that the poem could not stand on its own.

Some readers may find the seemingly unruddered drift of Gluck's poem appealing and opine that the spread of daily speech is in itself fascinating, and others would prefer that the writer remember that poetry is writing , distinct from speech, and that the power of daily speech would lay in how well the elements are selected, presented, given voice and cadence. Gluck , to my ears, is attempting an imagined transcription of a spontaneous utterance ; the effectiveness of something so literal is best spoken, I suppose, but here, sans sound facial expression, hand gestures, the pauses, rises and diminutions of the voice actual heard , I find the poem to be dormant. It does not move toward some crystallized set of particulars that memorably frame the exposition.

In the area of prose poems detailing an author's bringing a past event into an at least temporary relief, I prefer Dorrianne Laux's poem How It Will Happen, When, which we discussed her last Thursday. Her tone is more engaged with the specific images that arise from her rummaging through her recent history--she shows an intimacy in the descriptions only the long view can provide, and yet holds back revealing the final mood as she constructs this poem neatly between the mess her mate left her to deal with, the ritual cleaning the house and the burning of all traces of what would remind her of a memory that would other wise shackle her, and the fast, unexpected revelation that what was an intellectualized acceptance of loss now hits her hard and without relief; triggered by a random occurence, she knows her mate is gone and not coming back, and this creates empathy within the reader. It's a poem of felt experience, and what I appreciate in Laux is her craft, which we do not see on the page. This has the power Gluck doubtlessly attempted in her poem.

Jim,

I have all the respect in the world for Louise Glück and have published a long admiring essay about her work (in Joanne Diehl's collection on LG, Change What You See). But so far I don't think the poems I've seen from the village sequence are among her best.

Maybe Glück's previous stylistic strengths are, as you maintain, irrelevant to "choral" poems of this kind. But if so, a new kind of invention and skill, appropriate to this different genre, needs to replace the kind required of lyric, and I'm not yet persuaded it has. "At the Dance" doesn't have anywhere near the social texture and precision of observation found in, say, Leopardi's "Saturday Night in the Village," a great poem that this one reminds me of and that I'm sure LG is well aware of (I heard Frank Bidart talk about it at last summer at an event where LG was also present). Maybe the comparison to Leopardi sets the bar too high. But if the intent is "to nest personal speech in public speech, public life," I don't think it has been especially well realized. The representation of communal life seems attenuated, generalized, vague.

You have said before on this board that "Judges are judged by their judgments." The difficulty is that judgments can only judge the judge through the intervention of yet another judge, who will also be judged by his or her judgments of the first judge's judgments, and so on in infinite regress. So quoting this dictum cannot settle an argument.

One's own judgments, like those of anyone else, are always open to contestation and revision. I'd be happy to be shown that I'm wrong through a persuasive close reading. The most detailed approving discussions of the poem so far have focused on theme and statement more than diction, form, and voice.

Hi Ted (and others),

I'd been wondering where and how to say this, and somewhat reticent because I kind of like the poem in spite of its faults. Maybe because of its faults. I was thinking perhaps along similar lines, but in different terms.

I don't usually agree with critiques that call a poem too prose like or bemoan its lack of musicality. Maybe it's just because I like atonal music, but I often think calls for greater lyricism fail to hear other kinds of music -- dissonant, atonal, even ugly. But here I picked up on something similar.

My favorite Gluck poems use spare prose in the service of containment. They have intense emotions fuming, so the language acts a bit as a sand dune to a violent sea. One of the deeper, most instinctive terrors I know is being in a house on the shore,.looking up on a gray day, and seeing the surf breaching the dunes. I have a similar response to lines (from one of the Matins in The Wild Iris) "Please forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful/are always lied to since the weak/are always driven by panic." I mean, Jesus, that's harsh, but the language is so controlled that the rage seems near insane.

In this poem, there are also emotions running out of control, but the language is neither giving the illusion of controlling them nor sounding their particular music.

Just as an aside, I would have said off the top of my head that a chorus requires musicality, because it forgoes the individuality of a particular voice in favor of the candence of language that has passed through a lot of mouths and hardened into a collective moral. Perhaps I misunderstand Jim's point.

All that said, I do like the ending. I like the play of words, and the steps, and the step-like architecture of the lines, and the heat. That last bit reminds me of Spoon River Anthology. I agree though that as a whole, the piece falls flat for me. "Whatever you did you did forever" is the kind of line that doesn't do anything for me, and the turn of the last couple of stanzas -- hard for me to say this right -- it works for me as a portrait of time and space, but not as a morality play.

Beyond that, I'll just say I always have trouble reading a single poem from a sequence when it has been divorced from its sequence. While back there was a Brock-Broido poem published here (Dire Love) that I now love, but at the time didn't know what to do with.

Beyond that, I'll just say I always have trouble reading a single poem from a sequence when it has been divorced from its sequence.

august, in my thread, I provided a link to several poems from the book which were originally published in The New Yorker.

Here a blurb for the book from amazon. It deals with the experiment she's trying with this new book --

since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as “the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry,” as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines — expansive, fluent, and full — manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück’s manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

Thanks.

I think while walking to the store I might have found a better way to say what I was trying to say. For me, the fact that her writing is close to prose is not a problem. More -- her voice is fairly permanently in my brain as similar to one of Bertie Woosters aged aunts, who has come over and is having a couple drink on the porch. It's hard like rocks. I like it -- it makes me feel like I've had a drink too and am kind of taking in this rough person in a reflective moment. I would have to spend more time than I have now trying to describe the particular work of language that accomplishes this voice -- but at any rate, it conveys emotion while masking it. It talks all the time of the past, but the one thing that it can't be (for me) is nostalgic. That's just weird. So while I like the voice of the end of the poem, it just messes with my mind, as if Karl Rove started gushing about how much he's always admired New Yorker cover art, or Patton was in a commercial selling Hallmark cards.

Characteristically the criticism addressed to this poem in this topic & others faults it for not speaking in a personal lyric voice from a particular lyric moment. But that's because it's not; it's doing something else. It's speaking from the vantage of a community and from a temporal frame spanning years, not moments

"Judges are judged by their judgments." So when I meet someone carrying an ice ax up Albany Hill (or Bunker Hill) I know I'm not encountering a mountaineer.

Hi august

One might call this a poem of awakening, when young women discover what they are attracted to and that they , in turn, are attracting the attention of young men, and it's here where I think Gluck missed her opportunity to present us with something effective and delicately presented, which is the potentially metaphorical structure of dance It's not just that young women come to understand that they have attractions and are attractive in turn, but also a sense of empowerment; one finds themselves in a mysterious position of both drawing attention to themselves by simply being , and there is a gathering feeling that one might also control the elements about them with various, nascent rituals of beckoning and denial. She draws away, but does not flee the situation, she looks down, but does not leave his side, she watches where his hands touch her body and flinches at a sudden brush or attempted caress, but does not reprimand, lecture, become angry or afraid. This seems a dance no less than the location the title suggests, and what really dilutes the power these burgeoning emotions and impulses might have contained is the way Gluck , or her narrator -stand-in, goes on with a what comes to a dead pan recounting of the facts; her poetry, perhaps, was supposed to emerge from the tone, but I would have been interested in something more closely observed, with something more about the interactions between the young women and young men, the camps coming into the hall in various clusters and cliques, where they chose to stand, some snippets of overheard dialogue, the eventual pairing off and awkward exchange of exploratory small talk. This sounds more plotted than the monologue Gluck offers us, but it is a way this poem might have come alive with a sense of place rather than become what it remains, a routine , uninflected regret.

it's doing something else. It's speaking from the vantage of a community and from a temporal frame spanning years, not moments

I agree. And I also agree that Gluck's penchant for writing book-length sequences of poems means judgment should be reserved until the book is published.

Having said that, I do think that ultimately poems are judged on an individual basis. Her poems in The Wild Iris are beautiful and powerful whether or not one is aware of the premise of the book.

I believe a work must be taken on its own terms. That said, unless it comes out that someone has been holding a gun to Gluck's head and forcing her to make these fragments public, it's fair, and her intention, that we look at them now. I've read several of them. I think she's on to something, but it hasn't developed fully. Blind alley? Autobahn onramp? We shall see.

There's a story of some young folks who put together an old-time string band and go to play a festival. When they finish, an old fiddler walks up says "I really like what you folks are trying to do." That's one of my favorite stories.

When they finish, an old fiddler walks up says "I really like what you folks are trying to do."

I think that's a valid crit. More than once, I've said of a Tuesday poem, I can see what the poet is trying to do, but I don't think s/he has successfully achieved it.

(Of course, other times I can't even figure out what the poet was trying to do. Although I think I've heard from other folks not to commit the fallacy of intentionality.)

"Judges are judged by their judgments." So when I meet someone carrying an ice ax up Albany Hill (or Bunker Hill) I know I'm not encountering a mountaineer.

Koan noted and appreciated!