You do get the feeling that there is a submerged attempt to marry myth archetypes with the sweltering and restless subconscious tensions that confront us as we, a race, reconcile the glory and agony of love and death, but Gluck boils her worries to an arrhythmic, unmusical aridity. Think of that strident piano banging in Kubrick’s most pretentious film The pretentiousness comes in large measure from Gluck’s glib and unconsidered use of Big Terms to make a reader pause and inspect a line for a profundity that isn’t there. “Good and evil”, “love”, “death” , “love” are all dished out like portions of food you would rather not eat — Eyes Wide Shut; terse, strident cadences applied to a scenario of ritualized, debauched despair, pushed forth with hardly an interesting nuance, phrase, image to part with and make us consider the further complications. eeeewwww, cooked carrots, liver, creamed corn, grossssssssss — and yet we have to read and digest on the sorry promise that it’s good for us. Gluck, though, recedes into a vagueness here that commits the worst sin one can manage for an oblique poem; it provides you with no reward for reading it. There is an absence of euphony whatever, and underscores the notion that the poem fails because it cannot sustain itself without knowledge of the myths Gluck is ostensibly deconstructing. It does, perhaps, fulfil a structural function with the single narrative which this poem is reported to be a part of, but the effect is lost here; we assume, the punch of this writing exists only its context with the other works that go with the storyline it obliquely refers to.
Critic Robert Christgau commented once that Eric Clapton was a classy blues guitarist who was perfect for the tasty, brief statement but who had the habit of playing in long form and , consequently, losing emphasis, momentum, and gaining only redundancy. Something similar might apply to Gluck, who’s strengths can be seen here, a confident voice, a sense of place, a subject addressed directly and indirectly without drift in a voice that still has the capacity to be surprised. This is a wonderful lyric, as much as other of her admirers might object to the term; she sounds like she had an idea of what she was trying to achieve. — tb
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There’s a poignant moment somewhere in At The Dance, but Louis Gluck’s drifting, shapeless, monotonic style effectively obscures it. She is an outstanding example of the sort of poet who has charmed the chronically introverted and other over-thinkers who love to think they have a rich interior life but who can’t really make it of any use; rather than measure among the experiences she’s had and decide what carries the most weight and value. We are handed , over and over, a series of lumpy reminiscences that resemble a long gaze into a unkept house; nothing gets thrown away , every item has equal value, and the narrative , such as it is, lacks any animation. Gluck loves to talk, but is hesitant, it seems, to create a hierarchy of signifiers that would create a momentum toward what she wanted us to assume was an inevitable irony. This is a droning piece, and what ought to have been a cleverly constructed series of parallels between the protocols of dance, the rituals of attraction and the surrendering and re-acquisition of power in interpersonal relationships is static instead, at best the the static-like rip of Velcro jacket being slowly pulled open.
By smell, by feel-a man would approach a woman, ask her to dance, but what it meant was will you let me touch you, and the woman could say many things, ask me later, she could say, ask me again. Or she could say no, and turn away, as though if nothing but you happened that night you still weren’t enough, or she could say yes, I’d love to dance which meant yes, I want to be touched.
Some readers may find the seemingly rudderless drift of Gluck’s poem appealing and opine that the spread of daily speech is in itself fascinating, and others would prefer that the writer remember that poetry is writing , distinct from speech, and that the power of daily speech would lay in how well the elements are selected, presented, given voice and cadence. Gluck , to my ears, is attempting an imagined transcription of a spontaneous utterance ; the effectiveness of something so literal is best spoken, I suppose, but here, sans sound facial expression, hand gestures, the pauses, rises, and diminutions of the voice actual heard , I find the poem to be dormant. It does not move toward some crystallized set of particulars that memorably frame the exposition. In the area of prose poems detailing an author’s bringing a past event into an at least temporary relief, I prefer Dorrianne Laux’s poem How It Will Happen, When. Her tone is more engaged with the specific images that arise from her rummaging through her recent history — she shows an intimacy in the descriptions only the long view can provide, and yet holds back revealing the final mood as she constructs this poem neatly between the mess her mate left her to deal with, the ritual cleaning the house and the burning of all traces of what would remind her of a memory that would otherwise shackle her, and the fast, unexpected revelation that what was an intellectualized acceptance of loss now hits her hard and without relief; triggered by a random occurrence, she knows her mate is gone and not coming back, and this creates empathy within the reader. It’s a poem of felt experience, and what I appreciate in Laux is her craft, which we do not see on the page. This has the power Gluck doubtlessly attempted in her poem. One might call this a poem of awakening, when young women discover what they are attracted to and that they , in turn, are attracting the attention of young men; it’s here where I think Gluck missed her opportunity to present us with something effective and delicately presented, which is the potentially metaphorical structure of dance It’s not just that young women come to understand that they have attractions and are attractive in turn, but also a sense of empowerment; one finds themselves in a mysterious position of both drawing attention to themselves by simply being , and there is a gathering feeling that one might also control the elements about them with various, nascent rituals of beckoning and denial. She draws away, but does not flee the situation, she looks down, but does not leave his side, she watches where his hands touch her body and flinches at a sudden brush or attempted caress, but does not reprimand, lecture, become angry or afraid.
This seems a dance no less than the location the title suggests, and what really dilutes the power these burgeoning emotions and impulses might have contained is the way Gluck , or her narrator -stand-in, goes on with a what comes to a dead pan recounting of the facts; her poetry, perhaps, was supposed to emerge from the tone, but I would have been interested in something more closely observed, with something more about the interactions between the young women and young men, the camps coming into the hall in various clusters and cliques, where they chose to stand, some snippets of overheard dialogue, the eventual pairing off and awkward exchange of exploratory small talk. This sounds more plotted than the monologue Gluck offers us, but it is a way this poem might have come alive with a sense of place rather than become what it remains, a routine , uninflected regret. Gluck sums up of the scenario in a quick application of the story’s moral, a conspicuous working of the old saw that when a woman means no, she really means yes. Something wonderfully twisted here might have emerged if she had hacked away at the talky qualifications around the poem’s main points and pushed harder toward the edge, talking about how women and men cause hurt and are hurt in turn by misreading’s of intent and gesture.
What Gluck had here was a small poem, a minor sigh of regret in later life, the impression that strikes you when you’re preparing for the day in front of you , or when you stop to catch your day. It is a slight insight into what had done in the awkwardness of maturing, but the scale of this thing, not epic length, not Ashberyesque in density , is, all the same, too much for this slight conceit. What might have been intriguing would be a juxtaposition of the narrator’s current situation and the anecdote she’s chosen, with a judicious use of the telling detail, the image that can stand alone, unadorned , which could contrast with an equally effective image . This is how one produces resonance that carry on beyond the page, and this is among the things that distinguishes poetry from the linear inclinations of typical prose. This is typical prose that requires an editor’s blue pencil.
The length of In the Cafe, appearing this week in Slate, would have you think that author Louise Gluck is a monologist. That’s not the case, we find; a skilled monologist will have a point or an effect they achieve , more often than not. Gluck’s poem long lines are merely that, long, uninflected, without snap or spice. Instead, we have a droning account of a male friend who happens to be a serial romancer — a sensitive male who absorbs portions of women’s lives and energy over a period of time and then leaves them for the next adventure. It’s not that this isn’t worth writing about, but this is more topic drift development, an exercise in killing time. Gluck doesn’t even go through the pretense of trying to make this intriguing as poetry and offers up the stale device of disguising undistinguished prose in irregular line breaks.
Gluck’s long-form poetry is part of the disparaged School of Quietude, the conservative conglomeration of professional poets who’s careerism controls the major book contracts, literary awards and plum teaching assignments who’s market-pleasing style, a gush of self-infatuated musings that prefer to leave the reader hanging in murmuring waves of uncommitted relativism — the sort of work that doesn’t move you to think beyond your conventional wisdom but leaves you anxiety -ridden in the decorated fringes of your misery. The attitude, among the worse offenders , seems to be gutless, indecisive, reflective rather than reflexive, passive rather than active in the world. One appreciates stillness and the sharply observed detail independent of an interfering ego, but that is not what Quietude, in the worst of it’s world, is about; the poets seem to be bothered that they were cursed with compositional skills. You read them time and again and come away with the idea that a requirement among this coterie is to speak of themselves in their work as attempting to have an experience. You can feel the shrug , since the poet dropping his pen, you can nearly hear the soft swearing under his or her breath about the perception being too difficult to convey with wonder, awe, as a miracle in itself. That is to say, complacency wins again and the prospect of changing one’s loath some circumstance is too frightening. One would rather suffer with what they know rather than dare a single foot step in another direction. The worst of this kind of poetry, I’ve heard, is like a three-hour forced tour of your own living room.
Hers is better described, perhaps, as the “ School of Drone”, a kind of outlining of unexceptional incidents involving straw figures wherein a reader suffers what would have been a tolerable three minute on -air NPR essay about a diminutive epiphany stretched egregious lengths. that provoke involuntary teeth grinding. One isn't really concerned with Gluck’s portrait of a man-in-process; she attempts a neat inversion in maintaining, toward the end, that this man wasn't a bastard nor a feckless creep. By the time she grapples with her reasons for having sympathy for her comrade’s quest for enlightenment, we are out of sympathy with her tale. This becomes the melodrama you switch the channel from.
It’s cut-rate D.H.Lawrence, but without the skewed erotics.She does, retain Lawrence’s rhetorical bulk.Like him, she sounds like she’s trying to talk herself into believing her basic premise as well as the reader, a trait that makes “In the Cafe” a dry lecture that hinges on a vague and brittle point. This poem is the equivalent of the bore at the party who continues to prate although everyone else has gone home and the lights are turned off . Adding to the despair over this poem’s glacial pace is the promise of the first lines, which are bright, with a hint of witty resignation;
It’s natural to be tired of earth.
When you’ve been dead this long, you’ll probably be tired of heaven.
It’s a perfect set up for a story of an every man’s quest for the place where he might find contentment in love and spirit. But where there might have been a telling comedy that provides the moral that our expectations undercut what, we assume, are our virtuous yearnings instead turns into a drab recollection. No time is wasted in weighing down the promise of the first two lines with the leaden grouchiness of the second two: .
You do what you can do in a place
but after awhile you exhaust that place,
so you long for rescue.
This gives the whole game away.I wonder if this would have worked far, far better if Gluck had written this as a short story. The prose -quality of these lines might have bloomed a little more, breathed a little more air, the scenario might have been more compelling. The first lines are terrific and they could have been a poem by themselves, a condensing Gluck seemingly wants nothing to do with. Being succinct has amazing advantages.It provides an ending, a place to land. Gluck and other writers — myself at times — often mistake raw length for more substantial writing. Some writers have the gift to go long and reward the patient reader . Most do not, and few of us are Proust, few of us are Whitman, few of us are early Allan Ginsberg.
Originally published at https://www.thevariablefoot.com.
