Louise Glück's "The Wild Iris"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943. She is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Winter Recipes from the Collective (2021); Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), which won the National Book Award; Poems: 1962-2012 (2012), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Ararat (1990), which won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. In 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her other honors include The New Yorker’s Book Award in Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Glück was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999 and named the 12th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003. Glück has taught English and creative writing at Williams College, Yale University, Boston University, the University of Iowa, and Goddard College. She died in 2023.

-bio via Library of Congress

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.5	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, April 22, 2024.
0:09.9	And it's the birthday of Nobel laureate and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Louise Glick, rhymes with Glick.
0:19.3	Glick died just last year at the age of 80.
0:23.0	The poem is called The Wild Iris.
0:27.3	And it seems like a perfectly appropriate poem,
0:31.3	not only for the beginning of spring,
0:33.3	but for reading on the birthday of the poet.
0:38.3	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it again.
0:43.3	Wild Iris.
0:47.3	At the end of my suffering there was a door.
0:51.3	Hear me out.
0:52.3	That which you call death, I remember. Overhead noises, branches of the pine
0:59.5	shifting, then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive
1:07.7	as consciousness buried in the dark earth.
1:12.4	Then it was over.
1:16.8	That which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak,
1:20.3	ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little,
1:23.9	and what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs.
1:30.7	You who do not remember passage from the other world, I tell you I could speak again.
1:38.3	Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice. From the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.
1:59.0	On its surface, this poem is very much about a flower, the iris being a perennial flower. often, there are two varieties of iris, a bulb variety and a
	...

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