After years of controversy, the Nobel eggheads finally got it right again. I had hoped for a surprise Margaret Atwood win, or an Anne Carson, but this is just as good, really. I have been studying and closely reading Glück’s work since 1994 when an old mentor prof of mine introduced me to her stuff in our Poetry of the United States undergrad course. A brilliant choice all around, and much deserved.
(This quote below pretty much sums up why I’ve always kept a day job on the side instead of just (only) drinking and carousing like a caricature of a poet from a poorly remembered reading of a Beat novel.)
“When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art,” Glück said. “I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly – the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching – the minute I had obligations in the world – I started to write again.”
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