The spectral possibility that gives lyric its urgency is not that the beloved isn’t listening, but that the beloved doesn’t exist. Prayer takes place at the edge of a similar abyss.
from “The Sower against Gardens” by Linda Gregerson
Tag: louise gluck notes
7.1.17
A thought: Love is the distance itself.
Simone Weil: “Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.”
Louise Gluck from Against Sincerity
maud ellman
For the anorectic “hunger is a form of speech; and speech is necessarily a dialogue whose meanings do not end with the intentions of the speaker [whose body is] enmeshed in social codes that precede […] and outlast […] its consciousness” (1993: 3).
Plainly, I loved the sentence as a unit: the beginning of a preoccupation with syntax. Those who love syntax less find in it the stultifying air of the academy: it is, after all, a language of rules, of order. Its opposite is music, that quality of language which is felt to persist in the absence of rule. One possible idea behind such preferences is the fantasy of the poet as renegade, as the lawless outsider. It seems to me that the idea of lawlessness is a romance, and romance is what I most struggle to be free of.
Louise Gluck, Proofs & Theories, 8
The world is complete without us. Intolerable fact. To which the poet responds by rebelling, wanting to prove otherwise. Out of wounded vanity or stubborn pride or desolate need, the poet lives in chronic dispute with fact, and an astonishment occurs: another fact is created, like a new element, in partial contradiction of the intolerable.
Louise Gluck from Proofs & Theories
Louise Gluck from “Against Sincerity” in Proofs & Theories
Simona Giordano, Understanding Eating Disorders
Joan Jacobs Brumberg from Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease
Joan Jacobs Brumberg Fasting Girls The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease
Little Bristling Soul 