On reading the wild iris
Eleanor Dean
Who am I to write about Louise Glück?
I’m not a scholar of her work, I hardly count as a person who reads poetry. Before she passed
away, I hadn’t read any of her work. I hadn’t read any poetry recently, to be perfectly honest.
Poetry felt, to me, opaque. Impenetrable. How could I even go about reading it? Can you
consume it the same way you do a novel, word after word, bite after bite, until the whole thing is
polished off? Why would I read something so beyond my understanding? Who gets to see
behind the veil? When do you read poetry? Dusk? Dawn? After lunch? Where are you
supposed to read it? At the base of a tree, sunlight slipping through the branches? Should I puff
on a pipe while turning the pages? Where do I buy a pipe in the 21st century?
I found her while browsing in a bookstore. I knew her name from the announcements of her
passing away. I pulled out The Wild Iris, a slim volume with a cover hailing her many accolades.
But what led me to buy the book, what convinced me to try and untangle that thorny mass of
poetry, was her poem “April,” which happened to fall open when I picked The Wild Iris up. God watches their creation in disappointment, complaining they “expected better of two creatures / who were given minds.” Glück had synthesized, in these two lines, almost every frustration I’d been feeling about times I’d failed to take agency in my life, moments when I’d failed to recognize my right to take control of my life. Here was a poet, pulling truth like teeth from the mess of frustration, anger, and grief, and putting words to it, giving form to feelings I had yet to identify.
I read The Wild Iris over the course of three nights. I read until I found a phrase I didn’t
understand, a meaning that I had yet to grasp. I rolled the words around in my mouth, I gave
them different relationships to each other. I reached for a pen whenever I read a phrase that cut
through me to my core. I read a poem. I reread it the next day. I underlined something else that I
hadn’t found the night before.
I think I’m starting to understand how to read poetry: without structure, listening for my own
response and interpretation, letting my instincts guide the process. I am an active agent in how I
receive the poet’s art.
In reading The Wild Iris, I found someone who sincerely considered her mortality, someone who
knew that “these small chips of matter” wouldn’t last, a writer who understood that the only thing that would remain for hundreds of years after she was gone would be her words. For Glück, the only thing eternal was “the emptiness of heaven.” And yet, her work is not overwhelmed by this. At the center of her poetry, there is a beating heart: a voice, one that would bend oblivion, break through it, and make itself known.
And here is the moment when I decide I need to write about Glück, because it is a need:
“Daisies,” written from the perspective of the titular flower, finds that “the mind / wants to shine,
plainly, as / machines shine, and not / grow deep, as, for example, roots.” What Glück was
getting at, what she was grappling with, was the nature of being a writer. She’s taking a
half-formed idea, growing and developing it through the care of her words, letting it emerge from
the ground, not shining like a jewel, but covered in the dirt accrued from the act of creation.
For me, the act of reading is a dialogue with the writer, an act of creation in and of itself.
Reading distills meaning from that constant conversation with the writer, keeping them alive and
real to us long after they are gone. It is the dinner party that goes on for eternity, raucous and
churning and constant.
When I first started reading The Wild Iris, I didn’t believe I had the privilege to read it, much less
write about it. I thought I had to be invited in, anointed by those who came before me. But this,
what I’m doing here with words and ideas, is an inalienable right, not a privilege. With these words, I write my own invitation to that dinner party of writers and readers.