Return of the Pod

A cluster on Louise Glück, and other news...

As you’ve probably heard, the podcast recently returned from its first real hiatus with a cluster of episodes on the poet Louise Glück, who passed away just over a month ago, on October 13, 2023.

Her death, which followed just two weeks after her diagnosis with metastatic cancer, came as a shock to the poetry world—and as a great and sudden source of sadness to her friends. I feel incredibly privileged to have been able to gather three of those friends—Elisa Gonzalez, Langdon Hammer, and Ellen Bryant Voigt—for conversations about Glück’s work. Those conversations, following the usual format of the podcast, each focused on a single poem by Louise, inevitably become conversations about friendship, about grief, and about the life of poetry writ large.

As Lanny Hammer says in our conversation, Louise was a “one-on-one person”; she cultivated intimate friendships with people one at a time; she took a particularly intense kind of pleasure in getting you alone. The strength of those intimacies shine through in her poems, as they do in these conversations with her friends, but then so too do the conversations begin to speak to each other, forming a kind of asynchronous chorus.

The episodes in some sense move backwards in time: Elisa was Louise’s student at Yale, and she talks about what it was like to begin to write poetry under Louise’s sharp eye, while also at the same time studying and writing about Louise’s own poetry for a class she took with Lanny Hammer. Lanny, meanwhile, was Louise’s colleague for many years. In the poem he chooses, we hear Louise imagining a younger self offering comfort to an older one on the edge of crisis, or perhaps death. Ellen, who first came to know Louise at the very beginning of their careers as poets, talks so movingly about how Louise always carried a sense of dread about illness and yet found a way to balance it with a profound self-assurance, a belief in the fatedness of her own poetic greatness. And yet we also hear from Ellen about the very beginning of Louise’s career as a teacher, and about how that unlocked some new sense of her power as a poet. So that conversation, last in the series, links back up with the conversation with Elisa, which started us off.

I barely overlapped with Louise in my own time at Yale, and I was too shy to try to get to know her. I regret that. I do also feel like these conversations get me closer to something like knowledge, not just of the poems but also of the person. We hear Louise’s voice in each episode—literally, in recordings of the poems, but also figuratively in the sense that the three guests, three of her interlocutors in life, clearly have not stopped talking to their friend.

Here are those conversations:

31. Elisa Gonzalez on Louise Glück (“A Village Life”): Apple, Spotify, Google

32. Langdon Hammer on Louise Glück (“A Foreshortened Journey”): Apple, Spotify, Google

33. Ellen Bryant Voigt on Louise Glück (“Brooding Likeness”): Apple, Spotify, Google

They felt special to me; I hope they will to you.

The podcast will now resume its more usual pace: new episodes on Mondays, each on a different poet and poem. I’ve already recorded a handful of those conversations, others still in the planning stages, and I’m excited to share them all with you. Make sure you’re following the podcast on your preferred platform, and share, rate, and review it so that the audience can continue to grow.

Finally, just a quick plug for a piece of mine that came out at the end of summer: I reviewed Ben Lerner’s return to poetry, The Lights, for The New Yorker. I really loved the book; you can read that review here.