A Young Writer's Response to Louise Glück Winning the Nobel

By Hannah Paige

Perhaps the most impactful way to view Louise Glück’s winning the Nobel Prize, is to view it as an achievement that could not have been possible without the autobiographical influences that inevitably affect all writers, young or old. Young writers, in particular, are often told that their knowledge is invalid, is insufficient, pandering. What you have lived, young writers are told, is trivial, is not enough. Wait thirty years, then you can be a success.

But as Nobel Chair Olsson said regarding Glück’s success, “Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss.” Are young writers not also engaged with “shifting conditions of life”? Are they not also in a time of “radical change and rebirth”? To be a young writer and to hear these descriptions applied to Louise Glück in the aftershocks of her immense achievement, is to be validated. In my own writing, I also concern myself with the integration of great losses I have known with the creative works that I produce. It is and should be a unanimous concern of writers to consider the applications of one’s own life in their writing. This is not something that is determined by age, but by a commitment to the craft and a self-awareness as a creative human.

Louise Glück is not only someone who all young writers can look to, but particularly young writers in New England. It is perhaps an overlooked community of writers in this region, often overshadowed by the close proximity to New York. Though Louise Glück is originally from Long Island, she moved to Vermont after college, where she has spent most of her time as a writer. Where we come from, as well as the places we choose to live, is where we must write from. It inevitably shapes us as writers and molds our work. This is not just to say that where we are born affects us, but where we choose to live creative lives as well. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in California, but I consider myself a New England writer, because this is where I choose to make my work. To see someone from the area in which I am living and writing earn such honor and respect is, to be told that while region affects your writing, it does not define your success.

Louise Glück’s work is beautiful, poignant, emanating an awareness of the human spirit and the changes it undergoes as we grow as people that is admirable. In her poem “Crossroads”, from her 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection A Village Life, these qualities are as evident as in any of her other works.

Crossroads

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young –

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised –

My soul has been so fearful, so violent;
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

In a rare interview, Glück describes how she was a lonely child, one who felt most comfortable immersed in poetry. As a young writer who has also felt particularly isolated among her peers, for her commitment to the literary world and for her desire to remain, at all times, within its sphere, I find nothing but encouragement in this intimate confession. Louise Glück does not shy from the life she has lived, and that includes her younger years. The times when we are most raw, most foolish, most fearful and brutal, are the times that leave the deepest marks on our writing. It is those times from which we must write. Louise Glück tells us, again and again, and her winning the Nobel Prize only affirms this, that to write is to write from one’s own truth and it is to not shy from what you have, the space that you occupy as a writer. It is to own yourself as a writer, and to own all that went into making you that very writer.