Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Star context / Louise Glück



new moon today. i wake early. and listen to "Stars" while it is still night outside.

-- the "Stars" are a poem by Louise Glück, i came across it in Poetry.com, where it is up as audio poem of the day. the poem made me curious for more. so i googled, and found this essay: "Glück on Simple Language in Poetry":

"What fascinated me were the possibilities of context. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word’s setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word’s full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise; such language, in being generic, is likely to contain the greatest and most dramatic variety of meaning within individual words. I liked scale, but I liked it invisible. I loved those poems that seemed so small on the page but that swelled in the mind; I didn’t like the windy, dwindling kind."
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