Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...started when I was nine years old. And I wrote a poem about a horse who played golf. It all rhymed and I thought it was great...I walked around in the schoolyard reading it, and people liked it. I was the most popular person in the class that day, and I thought "this is a racket." So since then I've been searching for that one moment of greatness I had when I was nine. [laughs...
...From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, Monica Lewinsky's favorite poem...
...course, this is a single poem, and Gluck has always been a complex poet. Yet her new book of poems, Vita Nova, presents a self-revision which suggests Gluck believes she has grown out of something. Vita Nova depicts reconciliation with personality sins: fear, dream, lying, fragmentation and women who do not regret their sexual falls but instead say to their lover, "Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;/you had only to look...
Furthermore, Gluck is quick to switch narratorial perspectives, writing call and answer poems in which she is only sometimes the subject. Her opening poem, "Vita Nova," begins, "You saved me, you should remember me." A plot and an addressee are suddenly implied and then dropped, and the poems that follow are similarly oblique...
Both the beginning and ending poems of Vita Nova are themselves titled "Vita Nova," bookending a sequence of 32 inter-locking poems. It is a deeply reinforced whole--one of the last poems likens grief to the dark wood of a lute, referencing and earlier poem, "Lute Song," in which Gluck discusses the construction of the "overwhelmingly beautiful" out of "terror or pain." All of the poems address the problem of a new life, and the more obscure ones benefit from their embedment in the Vita Nova sequence...