October 20, 2023 In Memoriam Remembering Louise Glück, 1943–2023 By Richie Hofmann, Richard Deming, and Langdon Hammer Louise Glück’s studio in Vermont. Photograph by Louise Glück. Courtesy of Richard Deming. Requiem for Louise We were supposed to meet Louise Glück in New York, at the end of September, to see Verdi’s Requiem at the Met. My husband and I wanted to see Tannhäuser. Louise wanted to see the Requiem, and she was insistent. We decided to hear both, and I was tasked with procuring the tickets. Louise clearly did not have faith in my ability to achieve this, and I received a number of anxious emails in the lead-up to the day on which individual tickets became available for sale. Would the seats be any good? What would they cost? And, once I had finally purchased the tickets: Now, where are we going to eat? All summer long we exchanged emails in anticipation. Listening and listening to recordings, comparing our favorites. Louise told us about attending productions as a young girl, becoming enchanted with the music, the drama, and the atmosphere of opera. “I’ll restrain myself from singing along,” she said. Read More
October 18, 2023 In Memoriam Against Remembrance: On Louise Glück By Elisa Gonzalez LOUISE GLUCK SMILES AS SHE READS HER WORK TO AN AUDIENCE IN THE HOME OF NORMAN MAILER, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, MAY 24, 1968. PHOTOGRAPH BY FRED W. MCDARRAH/MUUS COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGES.) Before I can think how to begin, she rebukes me: “Concerning death, one might observe / that those with authority to speak remain silent …” (“Bats,” A Village Life). Flip the pages, to “Lament,” in Ararat, and once more, a reproof: Suddenly, after you die, those friends who never agreed about anything agree about your character. They’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing the same score: you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life. No harmony. No counterpoint. Except they’re not performers; real tears are shed. Luckily, you’re dead; otherwise you’d be overcome with revulsion. Those two lines—a joke that hinges on being dead—make me smile. A reflex, as I am also crying. And I think, as I often have, that Louise Glück wasn’t given enough credit for being a funny poet. She is more commonly characterized as an investigator of death. Some find her poetry too skewed toward the grave; I wonder if we are too afraid of the fact that breath is the only thing keeping us out of it. To speak of her as if her death is the culmination of the work, though, is to ignore her attention to death’s vast and fecund opposite, rife with pleasure, with suffering, dominated by silence though it produces much speech in defiance: living, in the present continuous. To live is the verb it’s easy to forget you always embody. I stand. I walk around my bedroom. I worry the cuff of my gray wool sweater. I touch the petal of an Easter lily that opened just this morning. I remember that Louise prized completeness and detail when it came to natural things, so I walk back to my desk. On my laptop, I search the Latin name, Lilium longiflorum. I smile again: my futile attempt to draw closer to her becomes a joke that hinges on death. Back to the book. My past self has drawn a line in blue ink beside this stanza: “Death cannot harm me / more than you have harmed me, / my beloved life” (“October,” Averno). Is there anything else to say? Read More
October 16, 2023 In Memoriam In Remembrance of Louise Glück By Srikanth Reddy Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff. Nearly thirty years ago, during my junior year of college, I took a poetry writing class with Louise Glück. I’d never read any of her books, but I was aware of some undergraduate buzz about a visiting poet who’d recently received the Pulitzer Prize for a book of talking flowers. Her last house had burned down; her father had made his money in blades; she would need someone to drive her to Star Market for groceries on weekends. (I volunteered once, waiting nervously in the parking lot until she returned with a cantaloupe and asparagus.) The person I met in the classroom was frighteningly honest about poetry, and about being a poet. She said it was okay not to write—that she herself had gone several years without writing even a single poem—so it would be perfectly fine if we didn’t share any poems of our own with her that term. When we did turn in something for workshop, she mercilessly rooted out “mannerisms” in our poems; I became terrified of this critique, which only made my writing all the more mannered. She would linger over details like “angels in homespun linen” in a poem by Czesław Miłosz; almost three decades later, I still remember her wry grin of envy at that image. More than anything else, Louise loved it when something was surprising and, in retrospect, inevitable, as it is so often in her work, and in our lives—like the ending of her poem “Happiness”: Read More
January 10, 2023 In Memoriam In Remembrance of Charles Simic, 1938–2022 By The Paris Review A page from Simic’s manuscript for “The One to Worry About.” Charles Simic, a former Poet Laureate and a giant of life and literature, died on Monday at the age of eighty-four. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and countless other accolades, and a longtime teacher at the University of New Hampshire, Simic was also a beloved poetry editor of the Review, alongside Meghan O’Rourke, from 2005 to 2008. Born in 1938, Simic was a prolific writer of both poetry and nonfiction. He wrote often about war-torn Belgrade, where his childhood was overshadowed by the Nazi invasion. (He immigrated to the United States in 1954.) But Simic also pondered the quotidian, the mundane, and even the miniscule. He liked insects, and told Mark Ford in 2005, for his Art of Poetry interview, that he thought ants were “pretty cool.” When he was starting out, he said, he often wrote not for editors but for friends, who enjoyed his “epics about toothpicks and dripping faucets.” Read More
November 21, 2022 In Memoriam Remembering Rebecca By Mary Gaitskill Rebecca Godfrey photographed by Brigitte Lacombe, NYC, 2002. I met Rebecca Godfrey in New York City in the spring of 1999. In my memory our meeting has something to do with her first book, a novel titled The Torn Skirt; perhaps she wanted to hand me a galley, or perhaps she’d already sent me one and I’d read it; I’m not sure. What I remember for certain was how surprised and intrigued I was by her, almost on sight. She had a wonderful face of unusual dimensions, a beautiful face, but with something better than beauty, visible especially in large eyes that were somehow ardent and reserved simultaneously. It was raining and I remember her looking up at me (she was quite small) from under her umbrella in a shy, expectant way that made me feel shy and expectant too. The quiet restaurant we had planned on was closed and so we walked around for some blocks looking for just the right place—which turned out to be a bubble tea shop where we were the only customers. We talked about writing and music; she spoke (matter-of-factly, as I recall) of working on a second book. But more than anything we said, I remember her presence, the pleasure with which she dipped her long spoon into the fluted glass for more sweet tapioca bubbles, the directness of her gaze, the way she listened intently and spoke softly. She was thirty-two years old but she had an aura of impossible youth. Her presence was not exactly big. It was enchanting; I’m thinking of the words Nabokov used to describe a character in the story “Spring in Fialta”: “something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable.” Read More
September 23, 2022 In Memoriam In Remembrance of John Train, 1926–2022 By The Paris Review A page from “How to Name Your Baby,” in issue no. 66. John Train, a cofounder of The Paris Review and its first managing editor—or “so-called managing editor,” as he often put it—died last month, at age ninety-four. It was Train who coined the Review’s name and, in its early days in Paris, as a member of the Café Tournon crowd, he pushed the magazine away from criticism, writing later that “theories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art.” Train went on to become “an operator in high finance and world affairs,” as the Times obituary put it today, but many will remember him best for his love of small idiosyncrasies: in the early fifties, while studying for a master’s degree at Harvard in comparative literature, Train noticed in Collier’s magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, which led to an earnest obsession with collecting what he called “remarkable names of real people.” You can find some of these in our Summer 1976 issue, no. 66, which features a fourteen-page list of names Train had unearthed in the records of a very real and now-defunct state department called the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization. (We published an appreciation of “How to Name Your Baby” online in 2015.) Train announced his departure from his post as managing editor, as George Plimpton and Norman Mailer recall, with singularly dry humor: One day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, “Do not put anything in this box.” By this he meant to tell the rest of the staff that he was moving on to something else. From the Chelsea office, the staff of the Review are thinking of Train, his legacy and “In-box,” his family and friends. He will be missed.