'Unmistakable poetic voice': Nobel Laureate Louise Gluck

By Rabia Iclal Turan

ANKARA (AA) - The American poet Louise Gluck was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first American woman to win the prestigious prize since Toni Morrison in 1993.

The Swedish Academy honored her for “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”

Born in New York City in 1943, Gluck attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University although she never obtained a degree due to health problems.

She was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by an abnormally low body weight, when she was attending high school. She expressed the feelings it caused in one of her famous poets titled Dedication to Hunger.

It begins quietly

in certain female children:

the fear of death, taking as its form

dedication to hunger,

because a woman’s body

is a grave; it will accept anything.

In Going Hungry, a book edited by Kate Taylor, Gluck writes about her decision to quit school to receive psychoanalysis treatment for seven years: “It is fortunate that that discipline gave me a place to use my mind, because my emotional condition, my extreme rigidity of behavior and frantic dependence on ritual made other forms of education impossible."

Her desire to write poem started at an early age. Gluck was 18 when she took night classes from poets Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz at Columbia’s School of General Studies, teachers she credits as “significant mentors in her development as a poet”.

She was making her living from secretarial work. But things changed in 1968, when she made her debut with her first poetry collection Firstborn, which garnered attention.

She returned to writing after two years when she accepted a teaching job at Vermont's Goddard College. “The minute I started teaching, I started writing. It was a miracle,” she later explained the process in an interview in 2016.

Eventually, her second book, The House on Marshland, was published in 1975.

Considered among the US’ most prominent contemporary poets, Gluck has published twelve collections of poetry as well as volumes of essays on poetry till date.

In 1985, she won a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, and a National Book Award in 2014 for Faithful and Virtuous Night.

But it was The Wild Iris, published in 1992, that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

Between 2003-2004 she was selected as Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress.

Currently, she is a professor of English and a writer-in-residence at Yale University, where she served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Gluck's work was honored for her “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” as described by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Thursday.