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American Originality: Essays on Poetry - Paperback | Diverse Reads

American Originality: Essays on Poetry

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WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A luminous collection of essays from Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of our most original and influential poets

Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück’s second book of essays—her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück’s moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection.

From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of “narcissism” and “genius” that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement.

ISBN-13: 9780374537463

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Farrar - Straus and Giroux

Publication Date: 04-03-2018

Pages: 208

Product Dimensions: 5.00(w) x 4.00(h) x 0.30(d)

Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Montpelier, Vermont.

Table of Contents

1

American Originality 3

American Narcissism 8

Ersatz Thought 23

On Buddenbrooks 36

2

Story tellers 41

On Realism 55

The Culture of Healing 58

3 Ten Introductions

Author's Note 63

In The Surgical Theatre Dana Levin 67

The Clerk's Tale Spencer Reece 73

The Cuckoo Peter Streckfus 80

Crush Richard Siken 88

Green Squall Jay Hopler 97

Frail-Craft Jessica Fisher 107

The Earth in the Attic Fady Joudah 117

It is Daylight Arda Collins 128

Juvenilia Ken Chen 141

Radial Symmetry Katherine Larson 153

4

On Revenge 167

Estrangement 171

Fear of Happiness 181