“Watching Consciousness”: Poet Louise Glück on campus this week

by contributing editor Ana Fonseca

urlThis week, UP students and others in the community have an exciting opportunity to hear a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer-Prize winner read and speak.  Poet Louise Glück will read this Thursday, February 13 at 7:00 PM in BC Auditorium, as part of the Schoenfeldt Writers series.  Glück will be also be on campus talking with students in an open session at 2:30 PM in BC 163. All are welcome to stop by to meet the poet before her formal reading & lecture.  Here’s a brief profile of Glück, so you can learn more about her before Thursday.

Louise Glück has had a notable 40-year long career as a writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Wild Iris in 1992, the Bollingen Prize from Yale University in 1999, and was appointed the United States Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004, among other awards and achievements.

wildiris-gluck-202x300Louise Glück most recently released Poems 1962-2012, a collection of poems spanning her career.  Her writing is noted for its technical precision and emotional intensity. UP’s Dr. Asarnow, who teaches her poetry in his Poetry Workshop, describes Glück as “exploring consciousness, and watching consciousness think things through.”  He suggests Wild Iris as a good starting place if one is unfamiliar with her work.

Louise Glück, (whose surname is pronounced ‘glick’ not ‘gluck’), was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and dropped out, and later spent her time teaching at Williams College for 20 years. In an interview with Poets.org, Louise Glück speaks about how teaching and mentoring have affected her life and says, “I feel quite passionately that the degree to which I have, if I have, stayed alive as a writer and changed as a writer, owes much to the intensity with which I’ve immersed myself in the work, sometimes very alien work, of people younger than I, people making sounds I haven’t heard. That’s what I need to know. Virtually every young writer whose work I’ve been passionate about has taught me something.” She is currently the Rosenkranz writer-in-residence at Yale University.

Glück’s appearance is made possible by the Schoenfeldt Writers series.  This program is designed to honor and celebrate fine writing by bringing some of the finest writers in the U.S. to campus. The Schoenfeldt Writers series was founded in 1988 by Rev. Arthur Schoenfeldt, C.S.C, of the University’s Holy Cross community, and his sister, University regent Suzanne Schoenfeldt Fields, in honor of their late parents. The program is permanently endowed by Suzanne Schoenfeldt Fields and her husband Fred Fields.