Authors
Louise Glück (b. 1943)
Bibliography: Louise Glück
Bibliography: Cathy Song
Song’s poetry collections are Picture Bride (1983), Frameless Windows, Squares of Light (1988), School Figures (1994), and The Land of Bliss (2000). Discussion of Song’s work appears in Conversations and Contestations (2000), edited by Ruth Hsu and Cynthia Franklin.
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Though Cathy Song is a dozen years younger that Louise Glück, and though the “identity politics” of our own moment may coax us to categorize and read her work on the basis of ethnicity, these are lyric women poets, American poets with a shared lineage running through Sylvia Plath, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, all the way back to Anne Bradstreet. They write about love, a yearning to transcend time and celebrate the mysterious; they seem haunted by childhood, loss, and the idiosyncratic details of personal memory. There is a long, rich legacy of verse by American women, a tradition to draw upon, resist, and make new. What does each of these writers contribute to that tradition, and how do they make themselves distinct within it?
1. Run your eye over the selections by Glück and Song and think about line length. Bradstreet and Dickinson lock themselves within set cadences and forms, whereas Whitman and Eliot vary between the formal and the free, the short and the long, as mood and subject require. When do Glück and Song break out into longer lines – and for each poet, why?
2. Both of these poets write about dead children and other lost family members. What are the risks of subjects like that? How are emotions modulated and controlled in poems with this theme? How would you describe childhood as an experience or stage of life as seen by each poet?
3. Song and Glück often write about bodies, faces, and other small particulars of physical existence. Song, for example, has written poems of this sort “for” and about the artist Kitagawa Utamaro, including “Beauty and Sadness” in NAAL, and “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” a short poem about a famous Utamaro print about precisely that (the poem and the print are both easily found on the web). Glück’s “Appearances,” “October,” and other poems also show this motif. What does each poet find in those details about the physicality and clothing of girls and women? Why do they give this material such importance in their verse?