{"id":16329,"date":"2013-12-04T18:00:42","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T01:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/?p=16329"},"modified":"2013-12-09T15:57:11","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T22:57:11","slug":"the-poets-voice-katie-peterson-and-louise-gluck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/2013\/12\/the-poets-voice-katie-peterson-and-louise-gluck\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poet’s Voice: Katie Peterson and Louise Gl\u00fcck"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poetry Reading<\/p>\n

Woodberry Poetry Room<\/a> Reading Series
\nHoughton Library, Harvard University
\nCambridge, MA<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Vincent<\/a>
Vincent van Gogh
“Old Cemetery Tower at Nuenen” (1885)
van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Poems of grief, disorientation and reconstitution, in ambulatory, geologic and elegiac modes.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Katie<\/a>
Katie Peterson<\/p>\n

Photo: The Poetry Foundation<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Katie Peterson, who has taught at Deep Springs College in California, one of the most curious campuses in the country, started her reading with, appropriately, a poem called Spring<\/em>. It began with I have been trying to read King Lear<\/em> and interleaved that with a partner trying to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles<\/em>, a sweet and funny knotting of prospective literary engagements.<\/p>\n

Peterson read a number of poems from her collection The Accounts<\/em>, which she identified as a book largely about grief and disorientation.<\/p>\n

Eulogy<\/em> is a beautiful tracing of the last four days of her mother’s life, evocative and direct.<\/p>\n

From This House That House<\/em> is, according to Peterson, about disorientation in various forms, but I found it a wonderful treatment of perspectivalism. The line From California, Massachusetts looks like earth<\/em> introduces a series of observations about how things look from one end of things or another, wittily aggregated.<\/p>\n

Provisioning<\/em>, according to Peterson, is a combination of a love poem and a landscape poem. In this lovely, elegiac poem about a California road trip in rugged country, the two themes run in parallel almost transparently. I know your forehead and your cheekbone by the argument they make<\/em> almost seems an observation of geological terrain when Peterson paints it alongside her description of rough roads in California back country, and vice versa.<\/p>\n

Spring <\/em>by Katie Peterson, along with her commentary on the poem.<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Louise<\/a>
Louise Gl\u00fcck
Photo: The Poetry Foundation<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Louise Gl\u00fcck began her part by saying how much she does not like reading her poems; she did a perfectly adequate job nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Gl\u00fcck read poems from a new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night<\/em>, in which a long monologue is woven in with the lyrical and the prose poems. <\/p>\n

Parable <\/em>begins with Where should we travel? <\/em> and follows it with other insistent, but not irrelevant, questions. Should we have a purpose?<\/em> Eloquently, the poems moves into the realm of allegory, following the transition like a kind of travelogue but with a metaphysical tinge. Periodically we seemed to have achieved an agreement<\/em> the poem eventually assesses, as it follows its sweet logic of subtly veiled redirection, with hints of history and truth seeking peering out from behind its visors.<\/p>\n

An Adventure<\/em> stoically states I am finished with amorous adventures to which I had been a slave<\/em>, travels soon into a related judgment about poetry, then generalizes: these farewells are the way of things<\/em>. Heroically, but wryly, it ends: I became a glorious knight riding into the setting sun… And my heart the steed beneath me.<\/em> Stirring.<\/p>\n

A Sharply Worded Silence<\/em>, written, presumably after, or about, a sad love affair, weaves together a wonderful vision of sitting in a place in Italy simply referred to as the “Contessa’s Garden,” describes an encounter of two women in conversation, with poignant recollections included: my mother used to speak to me in sharply worded silences<\/em>, crystallizing the memory behind the title.<\/p>\n

Aboriginal Landscape<\/em> begins You are stepping on your father<\/em>, which leaves an intentionally creepy, ambiguous sense of what this might mean. The scene turns out to be set in a graveyard, which momentarily clarifies things. But then the poem traverses the graves of many fathers and mothers and we come to in a dreamscape. Then there is a conductor – not sure if train <\/em>or orchestral <\/em> – who declares I was like you once, in love with turbulence<\/em> and This is my home, the city where I disappear<\/em> – a beautiful, perplexing, conglomeration of images, powerfully connected by travel and by alienation.<\/p>\n

A Work of Fiction<\/em> ended the reading, asking Where have they all gone these people who have seemed so real?<\/em>, and in grave response, I lit a cigarette, each breath patiently destroying me<\/em>. Powerful, unsettling and vivid, difficult to read aloud indeed. <\/p>\n

– BADMan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poetry Reading
\nWoodberry Poetry Room<\/a>
\nReading Series
\nHoughton Library
\nHarvard University
\nCambridge, MA<\/strong>
\nPoems of grief, disorientation and reconstitution, in ambulatory, geologic and elegiac modes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16329","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-poetry","7":"category-poetryreadings","8":"entry","9":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16329"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16373,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16329\/revisions\/16373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bostonartsdiary.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}