SOURCE: '"Free / of Blossom and Subterfuge': Louise Glück and the Language of Renunciation," in World, Self, Poem: Essays on Contemporary Poetry from the "Jubilation of Poets," edited by Leonard M. Trawick, Kent State University Press, 1990, pp. 120-29.

[Keller is an educator, a critic and the author of Re-Making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition. In the following essay, she adopts a feminist critical perspective on the negative treatment of the female in Glück's first four books. The critic analyzes the relationship of the role of woman and that of poet and finds that, for the most part, Glück views the two as mutually exclusive.]

It is a commonplace of American feminist criticism that, historically, linkage of the words woman and poet has yielded a powerful contradiction in terms, inevitably confronted by women attempting verse. Because those aspiring to the male status of poet have been caught in a conflict with their own female identity, as Gilbert and Gubar observe, "at its most painful the history of women's poetry is a story of struggle against … self-loathing" (xxiii). The poetry of Louise Glück testifies that being a woman continues to some contemporaries to seem an impediment to being a poet, and that women writers today may still struggle against consequent self-loathing. At the same time, Glück's achievement suggests that these pressures may, by providing major themes, compel or even enable women to write. Her often extremely negative sense of woman hood—as both a biologically and socially determined expe rience—has been crucial in shaping the language, tone, and style, as well as the thematic content of her poetry. Her four collections of poems develop toward increasingly complex thought and flexible style, reflecting her changing responses to the dilemma of being at once poet and woman.

The shock-value of the opening poem in Glück's first volume, Firstborn (1968), asserts her desire to be different—perhaps especially her desire to stand apart from other women poets, just as earlier women struggled not to be taken for stereotypical "female songbirds" [as poet Louise Bogan put it in a 1935 letter]. Here is the complete poem, entitled "The Chicago Train":

Across from me the whole ride
Hardly stirred: just Mister with his barren
Skull across the arm-rest while the kid
Got his head between his mama's legs and slept. The poison
That replaces air took over.
And they sat—as though paralysis preceding death
Had nailed them there. The track bent south.
I saw her pulsing crotch … the lice rooted in that baby's hair.]

To begin one's book with such flaunted offensiveness—both in the speaker's implied politics (her attitudes toward the lower classes) and in her ghastly perspective—is a gesture of definat individualism. Glück's mature work is neither so histrionic nor so technically awkward as this, but the poem provides a preview of her obsessions. It is immediately clear that Glück feels revolted by her bondage to the human body and the physical world. In her work, physical being is always a memento mori; the child always desires to press back toward the womb and prenatal weightless unconsciousness; and the woman's body, particularly the genitals that are the locus of her sexual desire, is the horrifying center of the death-that-infests-life. The pulsing of the crotch in this poem suggests sexual arousal, as if the woman were stimulated—willingly or not—by the pressure of the child's head. Here we have an indication of Glück's early preoccupation with woman's horrifying lack of control over her sexual desires—something that her poetry attempts to compensate for and counter.

That first poem is only one of many portraits and dramatic monologues in Firstborn through which the young poet examines the situations of women in her society, finding nearly all of them revolting. "The Edge" typifies the volume's sensationalized view of the wife's misery in marriage. The husband is bored, hardened, and associated with predatory violence; the wife is angry, wounded, yet subservient. Her role: bitterly to bear his children, tolerate his sexual demands, and sustain herself on his leavings: "Mornings, crippled with this house, / I see him toast his toast and test / His coffee, hedgingly. The waste's my breakfast."

A poet's vision, some early poems condescendingly assert, is far superior to that of the ordinary woman who accepts the roles of wife and mother—roles determined not only by society but by the woman's biological urges. Thus the speaker sets herself above her fertile, giggling relative in "My Cousin in April." The cousin, absorbed in playing with her first child and pregnant with her second, is seen as having given into the "stir" "in her body" despite anger at her husband. The cost of such accommodation is insensitivity, obliviousness: "she passes what I paused / To catch, the early bud phases, on the springing grass." In "The Wound" the paisley pattern of the speaker's bedroom walls is "like a plot / Of embryos," and "ripe things" are the walls of a prison. The association of woman with childbearing and physical life is for young Glück a deathly trap the female artist must struggle to avoid.

In view of Glück's aversion to the women's roles that conventionally accompany adult sexuality, it is not surprising that her work is filled with nostalgia for the presexual innocence of childhood. In the emblematic piece, "Flowering Plum," from her second collection, The House on Marshland (1975), the adult woman looks with worldly cynicism and some longing at her neighbor's adolescent daughter who gives herself with wholehearted joy to spring and the thrush's "routine / message of survival." The innocent girl sits under the plum tree

The poet who would inscribe meaning upon the world, if she is a woman, inevitably finds herself stained, battered, and written upon by the world. She remains the object rather than the writing subject, and that is the way of nature, not just patriarchy. Once again, the locus of vulnerability is her lap—the girl's not yet pulsing but vulnerable crotch.

Attempting to thwart this natural cycle of ripening and unraveling from childhood's spring to womanhood's summer, Glück's response in her personal history would seem to have been anorexia. Anorexia is both a retreat from adult sexuality to a childlike state safe from sexual drives, and an assertion of control—two desirable things for those who share Glück's sense of woman's powerlessness. The urges behind anorexia, and the relation between those urges and the drives behind poetic creation, are the subjects of "Dedication to Hunger," an important sequence from Glück's third volume Descending Figure (1980).

The early sections of the poem suggest that coming into womanly sexuality is a loss and a deprivation, that even in the most loving instances, a man's kiss, "might as well [be] a hand over [the woman's] mouth." Gendered roles and heterosexuality itself silence and suffocate, perhaps even impose starvation on a woman. The fourth section depicts the anorexic's consciously chosen dedication to hunger as a way of defying death and renouncing female sexuality:

because a woman's body
is a grave; it will accept
anything. I remember
lying in bed at night
touching the soft, digressive breasts,
touching, at fifteen,
the interfering flesh
that I would sacrifice
until the limbs were free
of blossom and subterfuge

Eradicating one's blossom means sacrificing the body that invites male domination and silencing. Glück's rejection of female sexuality, then, does not simply reflect self-hatred. Paradoxically, it enacts positive self-assertion, since she believes that a woman may escape man's control only outside of the gendered roles of wife or lover. Only without her sexuality and the fleshy curves in which it is embodied can she be sure of having or creating an identity as subject rather than object. The anorexic's starvation, as clinicians put it, "is a statement about autonomy, not an attempt at self-destruction" [Garfinkel and Garner, Anorexia Nervosa: A Multidemensional Perspective, 1982], Glück in an interview confirms this point when she identifies "the anorexic nightmare" as "the being taken over by sensation, and obliterated by it, obscured by it, your individual outline … dissolved in some larger shape." For Glück, denial of her body does not entail suppression of her essential womanhood, for, as she explains in "Lamentations," God at the creation divided humankind not into two but into three: "the man, the woman, and the woman's body" (Descending). As she sees it, the woman's fulfillment may depend on her subduing the woman's body.

In starving away not just blossom but also "subterfuge," Glück attempts to purge herself of the deceptions and evasions patriarchy has long associated with women. Just as man and woman are, for Glück, opposed as "thrust and ache," men in her work have a rigidly phallic singleness, while women tend toward the bending, fluent, multiple or, in negative terms, the duplicitous. This duplicity is closely associated with the female body and also with female language. In "Tango" she addresses her younger sister: "Your bare feet / became a woman's feet, always / saying two things at once" (Descending). Rather than being a dancer like her sister, she has become a "watcher," as if by remaining on the sidelines she could keep from female double-talk. In "Portland, 1968," female subterfuge, contrasted with upright singularity, is again tied to language. A stiff figure, presumably male, is likened to fixed rock that is being eroded by the sea's "transparent waves of longing":

everything fixed is marred.
And the sea triumphs,
like all that is false,
all that is fluent and womanly.
(Descending)

Glück's words suggest her ambivalence toward what is womanly: the triumph of the womanly sea (and, implicitly, of the female speaker) is at once a tragic prevailing of the morally inferior ("false") and a valuable victory of what is live over what is static and death-like. One might expect a woman poet to value the association of women and fluency—linguistic fluency being the ability to control words effortlessly, smoothly—but it seems that for Glück fluency is too closely associated with stereotypically female gushing, with the absence of control over one's falsifying tongue.

The closing sections of "Dedication to Hunger" make it clear that the kind of poet who may be likened metaphorically to the anorexic does not aspire to write with fluency. Glück explains that as an adolescent dedicating herself to the sacrifice of her "soft, digressive" flesh,

The anorexic distinguishing herself through self-denial becomes "like a god" in her "power" to expose her own frame and to reverse the natural progress of temporal development. The poet, too, wants to remove young life from the progress of time, making it invulnerable to decay:

Since the natural world is infused with time, such a poetic achievement is as god-like, as supernatural, as the anorexic's.

In the fleshless rigor of her style, Glück establishes a language of almost super-human renunciation, the poetic equivalent of the anorexic's "exposfure of] the underlying body." The driving principle is reduction. Her collections are of minimal length. She pares away at her lyrics to keep them short, restricts her lines to three or four stresses, and so concentrates on monosyllabic words that she often generates entirely monosyllabic lines. When not limiting herself to simple short declarations, Glück tends to chop sentences into small units, often rearranging them so the effect will not be fluid.

Glück's characteristic tone, which some reviewers (Greg Kuzma, for instance) have mistakenly heard as unfeeling, is one of enforced restraint. Pressured by nearly overwhelming fears and longings, the poet as metaphorical anorexic triumphs by controlling the urge to cry out, by forcing herself to speak calmly: "You see, they have no judgment. / So it is natural that they should drown" (Descending). Although employing conversational elements ("you see"), her manner avoids the relaxed talk or confessional outpouring common among contemporary women poets. Such apparent naturalness would be suspect; as she says in one poem, "nakedness in women is always a pose" (Triumph). Not surprisingly, some aspects of Glück's style involve adopting conventionally masculine modes such as a reasoned explanatory manner and frequently abstract diction. When not abstract, her diction tends to be simple, providing the reader with the bare minimum of contextual information. Glück's figures often employ jarring linkages. Near incompatibility of their contributing elements—their derivation from disparate realms or their contrasting connotations—forces recognition of their separateness, as if each were a separate bone exposed in the poem's skeleton. Even her frequent use of the definite article reinforces the distinct outlines of semantic and syntactic units. As Glück put it in an interview: "My poems are vertical poems. They aspire and they delve. They don't expand. They don't elaborate, or amplify."

In that interview, conducted while Glück was working on her 1985 collection, The Triumph of Achilles, she immediately added that she was presently trying to write poems that would elaborate and amplify, precisely because she had "so clearly seen the absence of this strategy" in her earlier work. Her efforts to put some flesh on the bones of her poetry have, I think, meant true aesthetic growth, evident in much of Descending Figure, as well as The Triumph of Achilles.

Ironically, the female "duplicity" that in some contexts so troubles her has been crucial to her poetic success. Her best works capitalize on the rich "subterfuge" of paradox, oxymoron, homophone, and pun, as well as the suggestive power available in even the most pared-down phrases. These strengths are particularly evident in her most recent collection, in which she imposes less rigorous divisions than before between language and life, between spoken language and body language, between man and woman, even between woman and her body. Rather than taking the fanatical either or stance of the anorexic, she now tries, in her own words, to present something "in its full complication—the yes and no being said at the same time."

Formally, this means she allows herself greater syntactical flexibility and more variation in descriptive manner. She even provides luxurious lists of blossoms and fruits: "camellia, periwinkle, rosemary in crushing profusion" (Triumph); "Crates of eggs, papaya, sacks of yellow lemons" (Triumph). Where her early collections contained only one or two poems of more than one section, her recent works are often sequences of lyrics; in The Triumph of Achilles, nearly a third of the poems are sequences, some with as many as nine sections. This expansion permits greater emotional range and fuller consideration of a subject.

Thematically, Glück has not relinquished her yearnings for an unchanging absolute, but at least in parts of The Triumph of Achilles she now admits her need for others and her need to give in to need itself. Significantly, in this collection anorexia and hunger are no longer dominating images, though the problem of desire and the need to restrict its satisfaction remains. This volume's preoccupation is with a solitude necessary for the artist, one thwarted by the body's erotic fulfillment, just as the anorexic's urge to expose underlying structure would be countered by satisfying her hunger. But where Descending Figure stressed the god-like triumph of the anorexic perfector, The Triumph of Achilles regards human imperfection and yearning with more compassionate ambivalence. Thus, in a poem tellingly titled "Liberation," Glück's speaker relinquishes her (anorexic) need to be in the position of control. She lays down the phallic gun of the hunter to take up the role of fleeing rabbit. This reversal is prompted by her recognition that resistance to life's processes condemns one to a condition of death-in-life, while willing participation in life's motion-toward-death is at least a temporary freedom:

Only victims have a destiny.

And the hunter, who believed
whatever struggles
begs to be torn apart:

that part is paralyzed.
(Triumph)

Like Achilles in the title poem, she lets the mortal part free of her god-like ambitions and is rewarded with love as well as loss.

In The Triumph of Achilles, the body, its hungers and attachments, the "part that loved / the part that was mortal," are more genuinely appreciated than before. In "The Embrace" Glück's lover enables her to relearn the "original need" to be touched, leading her back to "a kind of splendor / as all that is wild comes to the surface" (Triumph). The volume overflows with passion, and that passion is welcomed more often than before. Glück seems now to believe that while one cannot simultaneously be a poet and a lover, one can appreciate being each in sequence. She emphasizes the joy of sensually satisfied lovers, even when they have been changed "to a mute couple." Their desires for language and a permanent verbal record are incompatible with their desires for a transitory physical union that dissolves ego boundaries and transcends language, but the situation seems merely ironic, not desperate or threatening:

Then why did we worship clarity,
to speak, in the end, only each other's names,
to speak, as now, not even whole words,
only vowels?
Finally, this is what we craved,
this lying in the bright light without distinction—
we who would leave behind
exact records.
(Triumph)

"The Reproach" also presents this conflict humorously; the poet reproaches Eros because he has given her what every woman supposedly dreams of finding—her "true love." In so doing, he has nearly deprived her of her art:

What is a poet
without dreams?
I lie awake; I feel
actual flesh upon me,
meaning to silence me—
(Triumph)

Art depends on desire; the artist, Glück still insists, must remain dedicated to hunger.

Yet there has been a shift in emphasis. She no longer sees this renunciation as a distinctly female necessity or as something to counter particularly female weakness. Nor is her abstinence governed by the terror of growth and development, by the anorexic's fanatical devotion to starvation, or, for the most part, by the disturbing abhorrence of female sexuality that characterized her preceding volumes. Thus, in the poem "Summer," both she and her artist husband relinquish without regret the sating passions of summer for the creative isolation of autumn. As desiring, separate individuals, "We were artists again, my husband. / We could resume the journey" (Triumph).

A happy ending to one poet's "struggle against self-loathing"? No, nothing so reassuringly simple. Certainly from a feminist perspective, Glück's increasing acceptance of herself as a woman, and her higher valuation of female sexuality and of female linguistic powers mark definite progress. Yet any individual's ability to change is inevitably limited. Glück's poetics were founded on the anorexic's renunciative orientation, and though flexed and stretched somewhat, they remain largely unchanged. The attitudes expressed in her recent work also remain strongly linked to those in her earlier collections. That Glück's model in her latest volume is the male hero Achilles indicates the continuation of a male-centered perspective. Some of her recent poems still present her own sexual desire and orgasmic experience as imprisoning forces before which she is despicably and terrifyingly out of control. Glück has not passed beyond selfloathing, and this makes reading her work still a profoundly uncomfortable experience. Yet it would be false to suggest that in Glück's case the ongoing nature of her struggle has greatly restricted the power of her art; on the contrary, one could argue that this inner battle is precisely what electrifies her poetry. Nor should feminist readers and critics turn away from her and others like her, devoting attention solely to artists who themselves bring feminist analyses to bear upon their experience or whose more inspiring personal histories better point us toward positive change. Feminist scholarship will be enriched by remaining in touch with the varied perspectives of the many women writing today, including those like Louise Glück, whose poetry raises crucial, disturbing issues about women's complicity in their own oppression.