What We’re Reading (Summer 2014): Averno

ww_bannerIn this series of summer posts, MG staffer Kelly Nhan will be exploring books and music, festivals and goings-on, anything and everything Midwestern-related, and reporting her findings.

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Averno, by Louise Glück

Averno, Louise Glück’s eleventh collection of poetry published in 2006, hinges around the Persephone myth (each of the two sections includes “Persephone the Wanderer” in different iterations) in which Persephone, traditionally considered the queen of the underworld but also the goddess over crops and plant life, is abducted and raped by Hades. Glück riffs on this tale, out of which she reaps content that places the collection in a distinctly elegiac and contemplative American “confessional” tradition, albeit with a sparse, terse and ambivalent tone throughout; Glück’s lyric draws on the dark hymns of Sylvia Plath. On the most basic level, she shares a similar interest in death and loss in her poetry, a theme that the Persephone myth serves well: Averno was considered the “entrance to the underworld”, the epigraph notes, and the collection’s opener “The Night Migrations” notes, “It grieves me to think/the dead won’t see them—these things we depend on,/ they disappear”.

The changing of the seasons, particularly the onset of autumn, becomes an extended conceit for the inching effect of age and decay, perhaps becoming more palpably felt for the senior poet herself, who has had a long and celebrated career over her seventy years. “October”, perhaps the collection’s most affecting piece, uses this conceit as a vehicle for the speaker’s self-expression: “It does me no good; violence has changed me./ My body has grown cold like the stripped fields; now there is only my mind, cautious and wary, with the sense it is being tested”. These weary “confessions”, however, cannot be taken as pure expression, but rather a performance of confessing.

Often, Glück creates a distance between the poetic voice and the reader. The voice, although quite often in the first person “I”, moves from character to character, embodying Persephone and Demeter, her mother, and also shifts perspective. We gain access to the thoughts of the characters within, but the narration remains fairly flat in affect, which even borders on academic discourse in the first appearance of “Persephone the Wanderer”: “Persephone’s initial/ sojourn in hell continues to be/ pawed over by scholars who dispute/the sensations of the virgin…”.

41cg81kxisL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_This emotional distance, in contrast to the collection’s themes of death, rebirth, and trauma at large, shakes the reader at first. Glück seems to prefer the short, heavily enjambed line and terse diction. These lines are most often spoken in retrospective voice, as in “October” (“I stood/ at the doorway,/ ridiculous as it now seems”) or even an unspecified omniscient third-person narrator sweeping over the characters in the Persephone myth. The effect produced is a coolness in her speakers, who in this collection stand in a liminal space and re-tell their transformation or experience. Averno deals with the process of a discursive retracing after trauma, specifically through the vehicle of Classical myth. In laying side-by-side what can be read as intimate personal details as in “Echoes”, detailing a move out to “lake country” or “Fugue” (“My childhood:/ closed to me. Or is it/ under the mulch—fertile./But very dark. Very hidden.”), and the retelling of the Penelope myth, Glück asks the question: How do the small details of a life become reframed in cultural and personal memory as mythic, and thereby worthy of retelling?

In the two versions of “Persephone the Wanderer”, Glück creates two possible endings to the myth: in the first she lives, and in the second she dies. The poems exist between these two possible realities and operate within this gap. She provides two interpretations that frame the myths and in their unfolding, completely alter the outcomes thereof. Many of the speakers in this collection exist in this paradoxical location, between life and the afterlife, earth and the underworld, god and human, the “smallness” of personal consciousness and the grandiosity of myth. This nebulous space leaves the reader, at times, (purposely?) lost in the abstract, unable to grasp the familiar referents that make up experience. Not only is this a disruption of unquestioned dichotomies as those listed above, but also ambivalence about truth-telling and the reading of “pure expression”. Her critical look at the process of memory, even in the case of a well-recorded Classical myth, is reflective of her larger tendency to hesitation.

At times, the speakers retrace their steps and qualify or negate previous statements, even those that initially read as off-the-cuff aphorisms. Following the thought processes of the speakers is often jarring, bordering on discomfort, for the reader. For not only do the words retrace, but the speaker often jumps from one thought or image to another in sparse free verse, largely leaving the thought process out. Glück also uses repetition of phrases that show the process of revision in the words of the speaker. The speaker in “Prism” notes, “The room was quiet”, then right after, “That is, the room was quiet, but the lovers were breathing,” and “In the same way, the night was dark”. Then, “It was dark, but the stars shone”. Eschewing definitive, fixed statements, the personal is less sure and as detractors of the “confessional” might say, less hubristic. It hesitates, it wavers.

Although Averno utilizes the Persephone myth throughout as either the foreground or as more of a meta-textual element for some poems, the variety of themes and tropes with which it engages leaves the collection feeling a bit disjointed. Overall, Glück’s post-confessional lyric works well within the conceit, which allows for a nuanced look at the oft-retold myth. Her diction and syntax often refuse readers’ attempts at close reading in the academic sense despite their surface simplicity. Although these formal choices do contribute to the project of the collection, some pieces wander too far into the oblique and elision, especially in such pieces as the twenty-two section-long “Fugue”. What Glück lacks in diverse images, she makes up for in sudden drops in syntax or heavy enjambment, formal qualities that are jarring but effective for her project.

For fans of Sylvia Plath, Anne Carson, and Rae Armantrout.

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Kelly Nhan is a senior studying English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, and originally from Connecticut. She loves finding good coffee places, exploring cities, reading good poetry, and chatting about feminism. She is interested in going into book publishing, or eventually going to grad school to study post-colonial literature and feminist theory.

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