“The Conversation” by Henri Matisse
In the digestible “Feminism is for Everybody,” distinguished professor, feminist theorist and critic bell hooks writes that “Literature that helps inform masses of people, that helps individuals understand feminist thinking and feminist politics, needs to be written in a range of styles and formats” (22). In this sense one can locate the impetus for which contemporary poetry, especially that written by women, finds its grounding. Literary and poetic footholds are firm and fast to put forth a feminist narrative without losing sight of where comfort and resilience have been demonstrated through silence or restraint: as long as these tactics have been used by means of force or violence to subjugate and oppress women, they have been avenues of power also for women to embrace individual subjectivity. Few avenues of expression are as fruitful towards this endeavor as the contemporary American lyric poem, its success bolstered by its adaptability to bend and fuse forms and traditional structures of poetry, but more and more taking cues from developments in contemporary literature, art, culture, and politics which advocate for a freer creative expression. Fewer too is the number of poets whose career spans as many decades and has garnered as much international recognition as the American poet Louise Glück (1943-2023).
The form of Glück’s contemporary lyric work is a persistent scholarly fascination. Frank Bidart, after reading the sum of Glück’s then published work over the course of two weeks posited that “No important word recurs more often in Gluck’s work than ‘form’” (24). See also how Elizabeth Dodd advances that Glück “suggests a slight variation on the familiar wisdom offered by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley—that form is only the extension of content. In changing her voice, her tone, Gluck could “open up kinds of subject matter that [she] had not had access to’” (160) in comparison to her earlier volumes. Dodd groups Glück with an aesthetic literary mode dubbed “personal classicism” as an entry point for discussion of her poetics. Personal classicism, she terms, “is a poetic mode” in which “some women poets combine personal impulses (those that appear in confessional poetry) with careful elements of control that allow them to shape and frame—and mute—what are at their core, romantic, personal poems” (1). Of the mythic propulsion in Glück’s work, Dodd writes that “Specific tools of distancing may be important such as use of personae or allusion—often to characters from classical mythology—who mute the sense of an autobiographical speaker, no matter how intimate the tone” (6). The personal impulse is detached, but not tonally depressive writ large. The interest and effectiveness of a poetic implosion of the personal and public in a mythic context is that despite a source’s historical distance, it looms large in contemporary imagination in so much as it adorns the mask of the poet, through which to transmit language is also to tether her poetics to the public contemporary reader.
Dodd’s scholarship was on the pulse for 1992, but its date precludes analysis of Glück’s later work including Meadowlands, which is arguably her most lucid adoption of the formal aesthetic mode about which Dodd writes. In the 1996 Meadowlands, Glück’s seventh collection of poetry, domestic exchanges precipitate a marital divide while contemporizing visions and voices from Homer’s Odyssey are foundational to the allusive and discursive language of the poetry. This paper argues that Meadowlands employs while disrupting the forms of its classical source material to shape and articulate a voice that is persuasive towards affirming the sustained relevance of classical sources to contemporary contexts in poetry. On how one inhabits a poetic mode of “personal classicism,” Glück provides in an interview a sharp assessment of the undertaking of poetic vocation:
The artist views that thing he might make, or dream of making, as better than the self (though contaminated by, built out of the self). Contentment in being (of the kind that postulates the existing self as a kind of apotheosis) is, to me, a kind of dread. That and more is what the artist wants, I believe. All of us who are trying, somehow, to make something durable are driven by longing, and helped along by whatever allows the belief that the thing that eludes will one day no longer allude. But such people would continue to try, helplessly, even in the absence of belief. It may be that the difficulty of the task, the artist’s periodic or extended inability, finally fortifies conviction, lends it stature. (185-186)
Glück contemporizes the mythic in moving assumptions about classical reception away from the center of canonical curriculum English literature towards a reception which employs the mythic towards an end that demonstrates the danger of complicity in upkeeping contemporary American patriarchy (albeit wise to bear in mind a privileged factor at that—Glück’s razor sharp poetics and precise diction were borne of the family whose father brought us the X-acto knife). Risking the oversimplification of a work that is heavily allusive across historical eras, it may be useful to examine Meadowlands from the view of a poetic structure which can be broadly sorted into the mythic (including the parabolic) and the contemporary (including the dialogic).
Paul Breslin inserts a counterargument to Dodd’s construction of personal classicism as applied to Glück. Breslin critiques Glück’s use of myth as flattening personal experience without the mythic needing to absorb a universalizing tone. He writes that “one can believe that mythical allusion provides common ground without believing that it does so because the experiences recounted in myths are universally shared; rather, if one is familiar with the treatment of the same myth by other writers, one sees the new adaptation in relation to that tradition” (104). This view I find significant flaw in, being that it disregards the potential of marginalized voices to make use of a frame for poetic production that allows what author Maggie Nelson calls, in reference to the work of influential theorist Judith Butler, to “work the trap that one is inevitably in” (15, author’s italics). Breslin overlooks how Glück’s personal classicism transforms the mythic into a site of feminist resistance and subjectivity, as seen in Penelope’s reimagined interiority in poems like “Penelope’s Song.”
The first poem of Meadowlands is “Penelope’s Song.” Glück situates the poetic arc immediately in a mythic context, calling to mind the Penelope of Homer’s archaic epic the Odyssey, a once singular now archetypal classic figure: the smart and dutiful wife. Of course, an archetypal design of this nature makes the perfect complement that enables the archetypal cunning and adulterous husband, Odysseus. Penelope’s interiority is examined and revisioned:
Little soul, little perpetually undressed one,
Do now as I bid you, climb
The shelf-like branches of the spruce tree;
Wait at the top, attentive, like
A sentry or look-out. He will be home soon;
It behooves you to be
Generous. You have not been completely
Perfect either; with your troublesome body
You have done things you shouldn’t
Discuss in poems. Therefore
Call out to him over the open water, over the bright
Water
With your dark song, with your grasping,
Unnatural song–passionate,
Like Maria Callas. Who
Wouldn’t want you? Whose most demonic appetite
Could you possibly fail to answer? Soon
He will return from wherever he goes in the
Meantime,
Suntanned from his time away, wanting
His grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him,
You must shake the boughs of the tree
To get his attention,
But carefully, carefully, lest
His beautiful face be marred
By too many falling needles. (307)
There are disruptions to the set form made by Glück, though at the same time working as a resistance to the complete total brand of Lowell or Sexton confessionalism; however, traces do remain. The poet admits that there are “things you shouldn’t / discuss in poems.” In a sense, the speaking figure of the song is called into question: the soul is implicated beyond the “troublesome body,” and there is a Platonic nod here as well—the soul is bid to climb, but it is unled by a guide other than the self. In other words, the instruction is upwards out of the cave, but the final destination or acclimation to which the dialogic exchange poems answer and the parabolic templates mirror, and as Bonnie Costello writes, the song “exposes, through understatement, a dark side to the speaker’s control” (51).
Linda Gregerson describes how Penelope assumes multiple roles and has a distinct consciousness, something that may lend itself easily to the perceptions of a contemporary audience. The distance between lifetimes is made more familiar, brought closer. She writes that “If the second Homeric epic has held enduring appeal for female narrators, this surely has something to do with Penelope’s leveraged position in a complex economy of desire” (43). In a sense then, it does not come as a surprise that at the crux of Meadowlands’ most contemporary conceptions, Glück often cannot finish her trains without resorting or withdrawing back to the classical. Hiding, in this language, is transparent. See how Glück compresses this arc quite succinctly in “Quiet Evening”:
You take my hand; then we’re alone
in the life-threatening forest. Almost immediately
we’re in a house; Noah’s
grown and moved away; the clematis after ten years
suddenly flowers white.
More than anything in the world
I love these evenings when we’re together,
the quiet evenings in summer, the sky still light at this hour.
So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus,
not to hold him back but to impress
this peace on his memory:
from this point on, the silence through which you move
is my voice pursuing you. (309)
Glück is using the figure of Penelope to organize her own experience, wherein the final couplet seems perhaps to be a merging of the poet’s voice with that of Penelope, or at least become less differentiable.
Another lens to examine the Glück’s mythic and familial poetics in Meadowlands is to turn to the work of the Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary theorist and semiotician, Julia Kristeva. In “The Father, Love, and Banishment” she writes that “A man experiences love and simultaneously puts it to the test on the death of his father” (149). And so, returning to the mythic when Penelope assumes the task of bringing forth Laertes’ shroud, she equally assumes what would be Odysseus’ reckoning with the aging and mortality of his elderly father. In “Ithaca,” Penelope bids another instruction to the soul, it must “pity these men” (the suitors):
they don’t know
what they’re looking at;
they don’t know that when one loves this way
the shroud becomes a wedding dress. (315)
Odysseus’ absence enables a space that while weaving would have conventionally fallen to the role of the woman, in her nightly unweaving, Penelope instead confronts the death of the father, in as much a display of quiet resistance as it is opting instead to delay it: how then could Penelope fulfill the role of the tenacious, dedicated wife archetype were Laertes to die without a shroud ready for him? Absence forms the emotional foundation of the epic and registers a Kristevan love “that is possible, one that is true: neither satyric, nor Platonic, nor intellectual. But banishment-love” (149). This of course for Glück awakens in the context of the proceedings which makeup a contemporary divorce, and it also provides us a vantage point to make sense of Glück’s central poems in the voice of Telemachus.
One of the key visions expressing Glück’s alternative treatment of the son’s voice is in that of “Telemachus’ Fantasy”:
Sometimes I wonder about my father’s
years on those islands: why
was he so attractive
to women? He was in straits then, I suppose
desperate. I believe
women like to see a man
still whole, still standing, but
about to go to pieces: such
disintegration reminds them
of passion. I think of them as living
their whole lives
completely undressed. It must have
dazzled him, I think, women
so much younger than
he was evidently
wild for him, ready
to do anything he wished. Is it
fortunate to encounter circumstances
so responsive to one’s own will, to live
so many years
unquestioned, unthwarted? One
would have to believe oneself
entirely good or worthy. I
I never
wish for my father’s life
nor have I any idea
what he sacrificed
to survive that moment. Less dangerous
to believe he was drawn to them
and so stayed
to see who they were. I think, though,
as an imaginative man
to some extent he
became who they were. (339)
It is quite easy to think of Telemachus’ lonely upbringing where Kristeva writes that:
Banishment: an attempt at separating oneself from the august and placid expanses where the father’s sublime Death, and thus Meaning, merges with the son’s “self” (but where a daughter can very easily become trapped), mummified, petrified, exhausted, “more dead than alive”; a banishment robbing the sensible but always already dead, filial self of its silence on the threshold of a rimy minerality, where the only opportunity is to become anyone at all, and moreover, without the means for fading away. (149-150)
The existence of this model is in part what makes Glück’s contemporization of Homeric epic so ironically satisfying and successful. As often as Americans in twenty-first century life are perhaps now grossly disillusioned—though still familiarly conditioned to— the picket-fence and cut grass that would suggest two-point-five offspring as the ideal number to progenerate, we would be remiss as scholars to not also recognize our English language’s literary history as being by-and-large aspirational towards a trinity model in religious and familial conditions by default. This is a model in which the woman figure is commonly useful and necessary only as far as the primary purpose of delivering a male heir to the family; a guaranteed continuation of patriarchal power, and before the innovations of modern medicine (which is limited, the extent of flawed systems, and highly variable in who receives privileged access to which). This meant that bringing even one male heir into the world proved a significantly challenging quest, one that would often cost one’s life. Any kleos garnered from such an act would be either rendered null and void (e.g. the blame and disappointment in the birth of daughters and their general expendability) or deferred by means to remove the woman from the act of birth itself; often which are set by the precedent of classical mythology. One can think of the accounts in classical antiquity that allude to the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the multiple origin stories of Venus and Athena. How then can we begin to make reparations in language?
Glück is able to articulate what critics such as Costello and Reena Sastri have called a position of alternative practice, that Sastri writes “present alternatives to binary thinking” (190), bringing forth a new vision—a substitute—for masculine and familial longing. We can now read the context for which we think again of the final couplet in “Quiet Evening” (“from this point on, the silence through which you move / is my voice pursuing you.”) as a foreshadowing to the development Paul Breslin writes on “Telemachus’ Fantasy” states that the poem “reveals not only a fear, tinged also with contempt, of female desire, but a wish to envision the male as the pursued rather than the pursuer, reversing the conventional gender roles so as to absolve himself of the need to initiate sexual relationships” (106). Glück obliquely exposes misogynistic attitudes that too often pervade the lives of many contemporary women who are now empowered financially to consider the option of divorce given the time in which she “sees what one is” through mythic interlocution. The Telemachus of Meadowlands sees his parents together in his “Dilemma,” “sometimes inclining to / husband and wife, other times / to opposing forces” (334) but Glück renders the ending of “Telemachus’ Kindness” as the antidote to divisionals and absences:
as a grown man
I can look at my parents
impartially and pity them both: I hope
always to be able to pity them. (325)
Kristeva writes on the prevailing tendency in which a “man has a hard time finding something else to love…unless he were confronted with an undifferentiated woman, tenacious and silent, a prostitute to be sure” (149), and Glück’s mythic dramatis personae are acute complications for this model. Penelope is certainly the furthest mythic archetype for this theory, and poems like “Siren” (328) complicate this notion of silence as submission (”if your wife wouldn’t let you go / that proved she didn’t love you”) because they are juxtaposed with poetic conclusions that challenge this line of thinking. Stephen Burt puts forward that “A successful Gluck poem demonstrates its depressive realism by drawing unwelcome conclusions, potential endings, not once but many times before it concludes” (74). Costello notes how the opening of “Siren” “shows all its cards and is somehow less manipulative than a more conventional ironic twist at the end …in Meadowlands irony is…a tactic of self-scrutiny and an impetus to revision” (55). In “Siren,” “The dream doesn’t rescue the maiden,” but it is a present and clear vision which enables the maiden to decide the manner of her saving.
Of the more general, overarching mythic quality found in Glück’s lyric work, Gregerson writes that “Meadowlands has been constructed as a single argument, internally cross-referenced, dramatically unified. Its story is the breakdown of a marriage, and its template is Homeric.” (42), but thankfully acknowledges most plainly that this is a simplification of Glück’s poetics that assists in making intelligible the form of the work, which is not entirely Homeric. Glück develops a more balanced sense of trust in the poetry by engaging with by inclusion with the work of Christian and other secular literary traditions in ploy. Stephen Burt extrapolates from the biblical passage in the book of John wherein “Jesus turned water into wine for the wedding at Cana when his host’s supply ran out: Gluck’s title suggests that only a miracle could replenish her marriage, or make it flower again” (79) and on the “Parable of the Trellis” Burt elucidates that “the vine ‘sneaks along the ground,’ a Miltonic snake rebelling, hiding from God’s planned, adult light” (85). The serpent appears again in a more direct fashion: the feminist considerations are cemented in this tradition as “The Rock” sees the poet speaking directly to the serpent beneath the rock:
How else
did you approach Eve
with your addictive
information? I have paid
bitterly for her
lapse, therefore
attend to me. (336)
Glück’s speaker takes on the serpent as both confessor and antagonist, a dual role that mirrors the contradictions of feminist agency within patriarchal constraints. The poet’s voice, direct and unflinching, offers no easy resolution—her parables subvert the expectations of redemption and instead linger in the discomfort of moral ambiguity. In doing so, Glück’s Meadowlands leverages the parabolic not just to interrogate mythic narratives, but to reclaim them as spaces of feminist resistance and reimagining. Where this power enters the female figure it grants agency—but a sort of agency which is disruptive to conformist notions of contemporary patriarchy.
This is evident in Glück’s contemporary poems, though their touchpoints are still classically rooted, as in the ars poetica of “Nostos”:
There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory. (342)
“Nostos” is one of the finest examples of the poet’s lyric “I” in the work, almost serving as dialogic substitution for the Homeric frame of the Odyssey as a whole being a meditation on home and homecoming. Glück distills the lyric’s capacity to hold memory and present experience in tension. The poem’s meditation on homecoming intertwines the personal and the mythic, where the shifting landscape of the speaker’s memory contrasts with the permanence of loss and absence. This dialogic structure serves as a substitute for the Homeric frame, placing the lyric ‘I’ at the center of the narrative, yet leaving it open to readerly interpretation and response. Even in Glück’s more personal poems, the lyric cannot be exacted without working through and beyond its classical enclosure: Glück renders the dynamic of Penelope and Odysseus in “Reunion” (354) as an exchange “exclusively of small things, as would be / the habit of a man and woman long together” despite twenty years of absence. This is a substitution for the modern marriage of the poet, in which the keeping of scores has accrued points towards its destruction.
The dialogic sections of Gluck’s Meadowlands charts these kept scores, across form and are placed amidst the mythic and parabolic leaning poems. Glück’s domestic dialogues subvert the monologic tendencies of traditional lyric poetry. As Costello observes, dialogue becomes a “defense against the static vocalization of the self” (55), allowing the poet to engage with the contradictions and dissonances of intimacy. Gregerson similarly comments that “Gluck’s finest formal innovation in this volume is reserved for the structure of domestic dialogue. She tracks the wild, non sequitur, the sidestep, and the feint, the ambush, the afterthought, the time delay” (45). The exchanges between Penelope and Odysseus, as well as those between Telemachus and his parents, resist resolution, reflecting the fragmented and contested nature of classical and contemporary relationships. However, nowhere is this more apparent than in the most contemporaneous works in Meadowlands that focus on the poet in her most personal disclosures. The distance between dialogue is a certain removal of the walls from vulnerable confrontation that isolates where a poetic jouissance cracks through, perhaps unwillingly. I think my favorite example of this work in play in Meadowlands is found in “The Dream”:
I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed we were married again.
You talked a lot. You kept saying things like this is realistic.
When I woke up, I started reading all my old diaries.
I thought you hated diaries.
I keep them when I’m miserable. Anyway,
all those years I thought we were so happy
I had a lot of diaries.
Do you ever think about it? Do you ever wonder
if the whole thing was a mistake? Actually,
half the guests said that at the wedding.
I’ll tell you something I never told you:
I took a valium that night.
I kept thinking of how we used to watch television,
how I would put my feet in your lap. The cat would sit
on top of them. Doesn’t that still seem
an image of contentment, of well-being? So
why couldn’t it go on longer?
Because it was a dream.
Here is perhaps where Glück best employs the language of second guesses. There is a sense of uncertainty belied by the sheer number of questions posed in “The Dream”; and note, too, the sheer difference between the volume of speech by each voice. Assumptions can be wrong, but the final word of the masculine voice is terse and imperative in contrast to the feminine-leaning (in an Irigarayan sense) and more extensive. The poet Where the misgivings of the Homeric nostos are suppressed into the language of small things (net positive) between partners, the contemporary paradigm put forth here by Glück would suggest that confession comes, at least in part, as the last resort before the sum total of dissolution, removal, or absence. The subject of said confession seems to matter not, but it does seem to exact the sting quality of Glück’s work that Wayne Kostenbaum . The wedding was twenty years ago, what difference would it make besides for that piercing affect design to tendon-shred the other of the conversation. The mask wears thin.
Joseph Wright of Derby (English, 1734 – 1797), Penelope Unraveling Her Web, 1783–1784
I am thinking of Adrienne Rich’s work on “writing as re-vision” when I write that the past is not a fixed monument but a living, contested space—a tool through which the poet interrogates and reclaims agency within a contemporary context, and which we must enable to be celebrated as a tool of feminist liberation. Glück’s forms enable her to explore not just the rupture of relationships but also the potential for reinvention and renewal in the midst of the most universalizing element of our humanity, the experience of suffering. I am hung on Sastri’s analysis that sings “Reconceiving what might constitute closed and open modes and contravening presumed associations of speech with sincerity, they employ conversational tones and structures not as marks of authenticity but as aural patterns, as manifestations of language’s interlocutory dimensions, and as implicit invitations to readerly response” (190). Through the lens of Glück’s lyric, memory becomes an act of creation, an ongoing dialogue with the past that shapes the present and gestures thinly but with precision toward the future.
In reframing Homeric narratives through a feminist lens, Glück not only challenges conventional readings of myth but also redefines what it means to write the contemporary lyric. Her poetry opens a space for marginalized voices to “work the trap” of inherited forms, as Nelson suggests, reclaiming them as tools for both critique and transformation. In doing so, Meadowlands asserts the continued relevance of classical forms—not as static relics, but as living, evolving frameworks for exploring the human condition where myths find new life, resonating with urgency and insight for contemporary readers.
Works Cited
Diehl, Joanne Feit, editor. On Louise Glück: Change What You See. University of
Michigan Press, 2005.
Breslin, Paul. “Thanatos Turannos: The Poetry of Louise Glück.” Diehl, pp. 90–130.
Burt, Stephen. “‘The Dark Garage with the Garbage’: Louise Glück’s Structures.” Diehl,
- 74–89.
Costello, Bonnie. “Meadowlands: Trustworthy Speakers.” Diehl, pp. 48–62.
Diehl, Joanne Feit. “An Interview with Louise Glück.” pp. 183–189.
Gregerson, Linda. “The Sower against Gardens.” Diehl, pp. 28–47.
Dodd, Elizabeth Caroline. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H.D., Louise Bogan,
Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Glück. University of Missouri Press, 1992.
Glück, Louise. Poems 1962–2012. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. South End Press, 2000.
Kristeva, Julia and Leon S. Roudiez, editor. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to
Literature and Art. Translated by Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine, Columbia University Press, 1980.
Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2015.
Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English, vol.
34, no. 1, 1972, pp. 18–30. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/375215.
Sastri, Reena. “Louise Glück’s Twenty-First-Century Lyric.” PMLA: Publications of the
Modern Language Association of America, vol. 129, no. 2, 2014, pp. 188–203, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2014.129.2.188.
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