Cambridge-based poet Gluck to be appointed US laureate

By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff, 8/29/2003

Louise Gluck, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lives in Cambridge and teaches at Williams College, will be the next US poet laureate. Gluck's appointment as poet laureate consultant in poetry, the post's full title, will be announced today at the Library of Congress.

``I hadn't been expecting it,'' Gluck (pronounced GLICK) said in a telephone interview yesterday. ``I have very little taste for public life in the way they understand it. I didn't think I was the sort of person they'd ever look at.''

The appointment honors a poet's body of work. In naming Gluck, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington hailed her ``strong, vivid, deep poetic voice.''

David Lehman, editor of the ``Best American Poetry'' series, applauded Gluck's selection. Speaking in a telephone interview from his New York home, Lehman said, ``She's a very good choice, a very fine poet, a real intellect in poetry, someone of principle and integrity.''

Lehman characterized Gluck as ``an autobiographical poet but with a classical restraint. One of the great things Louise does in her poetry is treat the most intimate matters of life, romance, love, divorce, family, in a way that's very candid and very real, but without the trappings of confessional poetry or exhibitionism. She's able to be very frank but with a certain kind of ironic distance, even humor.''

In both personality and poetry, Gluck, 60, stands in marked contrast to the current poet laureate, Billy Collins. Collins has maintained a high public profile during his two one-year terms as laureate. In doing so, he has followed the example of such previous laureates as Joseph Brodsky, Robert Hass, and Robert Pinsky.

Yet the tradition of using the laureateship as a bully pulpit is a recent one. Other laureates, such as Robert Penn Warren and Stanley Kunitz, played a far less public role.

``I'm here to restore the old order,'' Gluck said with a laugh.

One of Gluck's best friends is Pinsky, so she has some sense of what she's in for.

``I felt it would be a good thing for my life to have some disturbance, some influx of the unexpected,'' she said. ``It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected. I'm hoping this will be one, but I have no idea. I also know I'm not one of those writers who profits from hours alone at a desk in a silent room. I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations.''

A number of laureates initiated specific programs. Pinsky started the Favorite Poems Project. Collins launched Poetry 180, a website that encourages reading a daily poem in high school classes, at www.loc.gov/poetry/180. Gluck said that, as yet, she had no particular project in mind.

``We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty,'' Gluck said, ``and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding. I think Robert Pinsky was amazing in this position, one of the few poets of real poetic importance who has a gift for public forms. I am not a person with a gift for public forms.''

Gluck, who earlier this year started a four-year term as judge in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Series, did say she hoped she might be able to encourage the work of young poets through the laureateship.

Gluck has published nine volumes of poetry. They are: ``The Seven Ages'' (2001); ``Vita Nova'' (1999); ``The Wild Iris'' (1992), which won both a Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award; ``Ararat'' (1990); ``The Triumph of Achilles'' (1985), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award; ``Descending Figure" (1980); ``The Garden'' (1976); ``The House on Marshland'' (1975); and ``Firstborn'' (1968).

Gluck also has published an essay collection, ``Proofs and Theories'' (1994). ``October,'' a book-length poem excerpted in The New Yorker last year, will be published this fall.

Gluck is a recipient of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters, she is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Gluck grew up on Long Island (her father invented the X-acto knife) and began writing poetry when young. She attended both Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, but did not earn a degree. Gluck, who is divorced, has been married twice and has a grown son.

She assumes her duties on Oct. 21.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com