Literature Compass 2 (2005) AM 163, 1–6
“Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and
Audience in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris
Willard Spiegelman
Southern Methodist University
Abstract
This article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in
Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and
commentator):
“Are You Talking to Me?”: Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück’s The
Wild Iris
– Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University
“I’ll tell you something”: Reader-Address in Louise Glück’s Ararat Sequence
– Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
Louise Glück’s “I”
– Nick Halpern, North Carolina State University
Jane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass. The full text
of Willard Spiegelman’s MLA paper itself follows this introduction:
Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed?
In the first line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” who is being addressed?
“Let us go then, you and I ”: is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby
put the poem’s readers in a position to “overhear” an inner monologue? Is “Let us
go then” addressed directly to the poem’s hypocrite lecteur, who is presupposed to be
the secret sharer of Prufrock’s emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered
the opportunity to step into the “I”-position and become, for the duration of the
poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself ?
All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms
its “radical of presentation,” are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric
address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly
venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry’s
“you” for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently
published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia
Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the
reader is implicated and/or addressed. In “Lyric Possession,” Susan Stewart’s 1995
essay for Critical Inquiry, the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably
postmodern formulation with her suggestion that “when speakers speak from the
position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the
situation of poetry is evoked.”
The conception of lyric utterance that was “canonized” by both Northrop Frye,
in the Anatomy of Criticism, and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry, is that the
lyric is pre-eminently and distinctively the genre of self-communion. Paul De Man,
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2 . Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris
Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they
cite “apostrophe” as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric:
by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate,
the lyric poet is turning away from the poem’s readers the better to bring a
distinctively lyric “self ” into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and
Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic “meditative” lyric was a local
aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more
recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always
more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward
yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves
to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance:“a lyric is meant to be spoken
by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words.” In these three
position-pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken
to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their
underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none
of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.
Louise Glück is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write
poetry that “requests or craves a listener”; but is the listener she envisions an
overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself
into the speaker of her poems? Willard Spiegelman’s essay on Glück’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional
conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose “persons” are all
internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Glück’s 1990 volume Ararat to argue that
Glück is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has
rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume
we are supposed to “overhear” her poems. Nick Halpern uses Glück’s 1996 volume
Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to
their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem
has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Glück out, as Hedley would
have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called
upon to become her.
Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College
In the heyday of the old New Criticism, students were taught – rather,
commanded – to believe in an unbridgeable gap between the person who
wrote a poem and its presumed voice. No, that wasn’t Donne addressing
his mistress in “The Sun Rising”; it was a persona. And of course the real
John Keats did not talk to a nightingale; it was his constructed “speaker.”
No one really believed this other than in regard to such classic “dramatic
monologues” as “My Last Duchess” and “Ulysses.” Especially with lyric
poets in the Romantic tradition the cliché rang false. Fortunately, the happy
pieties of those days have vanished, and we are now permitted to assume
that many lyric utterances bear the unmistakable traces and sounds of the
real person who composed them, and that the biographical circumstances
behind a poem can have (as if anyone ever really thought otherwise) a
genuine relationship with the rendition of those experiences that the poet
has given us.
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Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris . 3
But like the repressed, the authorial persona – or at least questions raised
by its spectral presence – always returns, especially in some of the most
compelling poetry of the past several decades. Regardless of how we imagine
it, we are always seeking, as Allen Grossman observes in Summa Lyrica,“the
presence of a person” when we are reading poems, unless we are dealing
with L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry or radical, destabilizing art of other sorts.
But what kind of person, and whether that person is unitary or multiple,
are issues that need to be addressed by readers of contemporary poetry. The
most extreme example, I suppose, of multi-faceted speakers, and of collective
identities, comes in James Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover, in which –
by the end – we have seen and heard, or merely “read,” a cast of characters
that simultaneously expands and contracts, as various dramatis personae turn
out to have been stand-ins for one another, masks being put on and taken
off, the whole cast turning out to have been fewer in number than first
expected. (I shall return to the phenomenon of multiple identities at the
end of this paper.)
Many poems also alert and direct us to the audience of their address, often
clearly, sometimes opaquely. Wordsworth is certainly talking to himself,
and then to his sister, in “Tintern Abbey.” In “One Art” Elizabeth Bishop
seems to speak first to friends or students (a generic reading audience), to
whom she is teaching her lesson on the art of losing, only at the end
addressing first her dead lover and then her true audience, herself. But who
is being addressed here: “Shall I say how it is in your clothes? / A month
after your death I wear your blue jacket” (Maxine Kumin, “How It Is”);
“Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you . . . But will he
know where to find you, / Recognize you when he sees you, / Give you
the thing he has for you?” ( John Ashbery,“At North Farm”); or “I take off
my shirt, I show you” (Carolyn Forché, “Taking Off My Clothes”); “In
this blue light / I can take you there” ( Jorie Graham,“San Sepolcro”)? One
could go on. Who is “you?”With poems dedicated to a named individual;
or others that develop a clear sense of relationship between speaker and
addressee; or others, like those of Kumin or Forché in which we can infer
the kind of person being addressed; or still others, like those of Graham and
Ashbery where a generic you might stand in for anyone, the job of
identification is relatively easy. In American poetry, we might posit Whitman
– circling, teasing, and cruising, his reader – as the origin of an important,
mysterious I/Thou lyric relationship. But who can tell? In an obiter dictum
from his youthful essay On Life, Shelley once suggested that personal
pronouns “are grammatical devices invented simply for arrangement,
and totally devoid of the intense and exclusive sense usually attached to
them.” This is enticing, even cavalier, but it is also helpful to us as readers
of poems.
In many cases, the job of identification is not only difficult; it is also part
of the poet’s project. Here are the opening lines of “Clear Morning” from
Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris:
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4 . Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris
I’ve watched you long enough,
I can speak to you any way I like –
I’ve submitted to your preferences, observing patiently
the things you love, speaking
Through vehicles only, in
details of earth, as you prefer.1
We seem to have entered a conversation already under way. And in fact we
have. The syntax is straightforward, the diction austere, the style nearly
transparent. There is nothing woven or overwrought (in any sense of that
word). Concision, simplicity, a tamped down quality: these have always
been the hallmarks of Glück’s style. A savvy reader would identify these
lines as sounding like Glück. We hear neither rhyme nor meter; we sense
the most minimal of figuration. This is language whose effect exists at least
as much beyond or beneath the words as in them, in properties implied or
intuited. The essence of the style is voice, and its power derives from
delivery, attitude, and tone. It is a theatrical power. Especially in The Wild
Iris, which strikes me as the most vibrantly dramatic single volume of lyric
poetry of the past quarter century, Glück’s poems presume a specific listener
implicated in a drama, a character who may respond or may remain silent
for the duration of the spectacle.
Who speaks these lines, and to whom? “Clear Morning” made its first
appearance along with 15 other poems in The American Poetry Review in
1992, right before the volume was published. Others came out in the Yale
Review, Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. One
of the challenges of the poems – a challenge experienced differently when
one reads them in journals, rather than in the final book – is ascertaining
the relation of speaker to audience. When you go through the volume
seriatim, you come upon “Clear Morning” as number seven in a
sequence. You have already heard four poems whose titles clued you in to
the fact that their speakers are flowers (I wonder whether Glück’s true debt
in this volume is to the Blake of The Book of Thel ); and two entitled
“Matins,” suggesting religious observance. Of these the first, a meditation
on the nature of depression, is not specifically addressed to anyone. Because
it contains the name of Glück’s son we can assume that it is she who
speaks. The second “Matins” begins: “Unreachable father, when we were
first / exiled from heaven, you made / a replica, a place in one sense /
different from heaven” (p. 3). And now we suppose that the book will
alternate between poems spoken by flowers to their gardener, and others
spoken by the gardener to herself or to the first creator, of gardens, and of
everything else.
The voice of “Clear Morning,” however, is itself not entirely clear at
first. It sounds weary, admonishing, manipulative, and, ultimately
forceful. The poem ends:“I cannot go on / restricting myself to images //
because you think it is your right / to dispute my meaning: // I am prepared
now to force / clarity upon you” (p. 8). This is the voice of God – which
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Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris . 5
goes on to speak (by my count) in 13 of the 54 poems in the book. The
intermingling of speakers throughout the entire volume is one of its
distinctive pleasures. We listen in on, or “overhear” (I’m invoking John
Stuart Mill’s terms) an ongoing conversation. We are experiencing a dramatic
exchange among characters, none of whom is speaking to us or for our
benefit. (It is also of consequence that Glück never uses quotation marks in
her poems.)
But Glück complicates or blurs issues of identity, especially that of God,
in two different but complementary ways. For one thing, much of what He
says in displeasure, disappointment, condescension, pity, and anger sounds
remarkably human, sounds (in fact) like the kind of thing a gardener might
say to, or think of, her garden, or a parent might say to her children. He
sounds, in other words, like Glück herself, the volume’s human character.
His words duplicate what she often says. What I call a shared voice is best
exemplified in the book’s antepenultimate poem “September Twilight,”
the last one spoken by a person, not a flower. It sounds primarily like the
speech of a gardener, acknowledging with wearied frustration the end of
her labors:
I gathered you together,
I can dispense with you –
I’m tired of you, chaos
of the living world –
I can only extend myself
for so long to a living thing.
I summoned you into existence
by opening my mouth, by lifting
my little finger, shimmering
blues of the wild
aster, blossom
of the lily, immense,
gold-veined –
you come and go; eventually
I forget your names.
You come and go, every one of you
flawed in some way,
in some way compromised: you are worth
one life, no more than that.
I gathered you together;
I can erase you
as though you were a draft to be thrown away,
an exercise
because I’ve finished you, vision
of deepest mourning. (pp. 60–1)
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6 . Speaker and Audience in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris
The speaker sounds like a gardener but also like God himself, who throughout
his speeches has suggested His disappointment with his human creations as well
as his ability to dismiss them with a brush of his hand. As Shelley said of pronouns,
Glück and her characters have no “intense and exclusive sense attached” to
them. There are two reasons for this blurring: the first thematic, the second
stylistic. We hear voices both distinct and overlapping because all creation is
allied, and all floral and human creatures live a common life. This is what she
calls “the one continuous line / that binds us to each other” in a poem titled
“End of Winter” (p. 11). The Wild Iris, like The Changing Light at Sandover,
portrays multiplicity and individuality as related phenomena. At the same time,
we realize that voice in poetry is a product of style, and the fact that Glück’s
technique – figurative, semantic, syntactic, and tonal – remains constant
throughout all of the individual lyrics means that she, the poet, speaks (as well
as writes) all of these poems, that ventriloquism is part of her game here, as it is
of Merrill’s in his epic. The principal difference between our most lavish poet
and our most austere one is that Merrill managed to make his characters, human
and divine, sound different from one another, whereas Glück makes them all
sound the same. The reason is simple: poetic style – everything we mean when
we consider diction, syntax, rhythm, and the deployment of phonic and semantic
resources – is a marker of poetic identity.
William Waters, the theorist of address, asks us to consider “what it is like to be
someone reading (here, now),” to which I would answer, with respect to The Wild
Iris, that being Glück’s reader is like being “gathered . . . together” (in the words
of “September Twilight”) and simultaneously “dispensed with.”2 Our mind, in
reading, receives the words of someone else speaking in sounds and sentences. As
an audience we are also a “someone” simultaneously central and peripheral to
the action at hand. Glück’s persona, and her floral and divine speakers are talking
to one another, not to us. We overhear them. But at the same time, of course,
we are being addressed by words on the page. In the same way, it is Louise Glück
herself who speaks all of her poems, even when putting some of them into the
mouths of others.
Notes
This essay should be read in conjunction with J. Hedley, “ ‘I’ll tell you something’: Reader-Address in
Louise Glück’s Ararat Sequence” (doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00164.x) and N. Halpern, “Louise
Glück’s ‘I’” (doi:10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00165.x).
1 L. Glück, The Wild Iris (Hopewell, NJ.: Ecco Press, 1992), p. 7. All references will be to this text and
cited by page number.
2 W. Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 14, n. 26. See,
especially his entire “Introduction,” pp. 1 –17, for a summary of theoretical approaches to lyric address
and listening (or reading), and his defense of his own nuanced phenomenological preferences.
Bibliography
Glück, L., The Wild Iris (Hopewell, NJ.: Ecco Press, 1992).
Waters,W., Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
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