American poet wins literature award for ‘ candid’ writing
STOCKHOLM — American poet Louise Gluck won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for her “candid and uncompromising” work, which looks unflinchingly and with biting humor at loss and trauma, especially in family life.
She joins a handful of American poets who have received the prize, which has been dominated by novelists since the first award in 1901. She is also one of the few women honored — the 16th female Nobel Literature laureate.
Gluck, who shuns most publicity, told Sweden’s TT news agency from her home in Cambridge, Mass., that her phone was ringing off the hook, and she was struggling to express her feelings about the award.
The Nobel Committee praised Gluck “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal” in its citation.
Announcing the award in Stockholm, Mats Malm, the Swedish Academy permanent secretary, said he had spoken to Gluck, and the news “came as a surprise — but a welcome one as far as I could tell.”
In a 2012 interview with the Academy of Achievement, Gluck noted that “worldly honor makes existence in the world easier” but said her true goal as an artist was “not capable of being had in my lifetime.”
“I want to live after I die, in that ancient way,” she said. “And there’s no way of knowing whether that will happen, and there will be no knowing, no matter how many blue ribbons have been plastered to my corpse.”
New Yorkborn Gluck, 77, a faculty member at Yale University, made her debut in 1968 with “Firstborn,” and “was soon acclaimed as one of the most prominent poets in American contemporary literature,” the committee said.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Gluck’s 12 collections of poetry were “characterized by striving for clarity.”
Olsson said her verses, which often draw on classical Greek and Roman myths and examine family life, were marked by an “austere but also playful intelligence and a refined sense of composition.”
Raised in a family with Hungarian Jewish origins, Gluck has spoken of how a teenage struggle with anorexia, and the therapy she received for it, influenced her incisive writing.
“Louise Gluck’s voice is unmistakable. It is candid and uncompromising, and it signals that this poet wants to be understood. But it is also voice full of humor and biting wit,” Olsson said. “This is a great resource when Gluck treats one of our great topics, radical change, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss.”
Gluck’s poetry collections include “Descending Figure,” “Ararat” and “The Triumph of Achilles,” which was published in 1985 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In contains one of her most anthologized poems, the spare and despairing “Mock Orange,” in which a flowering shrub becomes the focus of a wider wail of anguish about sex and life: “How can I rest? / How can I be content / when there is still / that odor in the world?”