American Originality
Essays on Poetry
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- € 8,99
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- € 8,99
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WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A luminous collection of essays from Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our most original and influential poets
Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück’s second book of essays—her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück’s moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection.
From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of “narcissism” and “genius” that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.
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In Gl ck's second book of essays (after Proofs and Theories), she carefully considers the makeup of the American aesthetic as a doctor would diagnose a patient. She begins with pragmatism, noting that an alternative interpretation of "self-made" is to make oneself up; in other words, create a self that is a lie. In discussing contemporary poetic narcissism's historical roots, Gl ck denounces weak imitations of Dickinson and Rilke. She explores uses of non sequitur, both effective, such as by Frank O'Hara, and ineffective, as vehicles for "intellectual fraud." Gl ck's characteristic wit and incisiveness are ever present. In highlighting C.K. Williams's ability to contain multiple universes of alternate scenarios, she declares these poems to "have more other hands than a Hindu god." In "Fear of Happiness," Gl ck explores the artistic fixation on suffering, arguing that the artist who insists on pain as a prerequisite to creation is locked in a cycle of dependency and even worse banality. The middle section contains introductory essays culled from a decade of judging first-book poetry prizes, including illuminating analysis of Dana Levin, Richard Siken, and Jessica Fisher, among others. This is advanced literary theory, requiring careful reading and a fair amount of background knowledge of contemporary poetry, but Gl ck's tone is conversational and accessible, and her opinions are invaluable.
