Mock Orange by Louise Glück
(The text of the poem can be found here.)
When I first mentioned to Maribou that I was thinking about doing some Louise Glück for the poetry readings, she expressed surprise and said “I would have thought that Louise Glück would be one of the people who would get you to rant for five minutes about how much you hate modern poetry.”
Yeah, but… man. Her stuff is just soooo good. (The Wikipedia biography of Gluck can be found here.)
I suppose that the very first time I read this poem, I might have agreed with Maribou in the first two thirds… but then I got to the line “We were made fools of”. I gasped like I was punched in the stomach. This made me go back and re-read the poem and, suddenly, it read completely different to me.
A short little story that, if it were a movie, would come flying from the clouds into the front yard of a house with downright luminescent white flowers shining in the light of the full moon and we fly into the open bedroom window to see two people failing to make love together but wanting to, oh how they want to, and, like we did, the mock orange wafts through the window as they lie, having failed, together.
Being in love with someone with whom you do not connect, but trying, oh god oh god *TRYING* and then, once again, failing.
I found myself reading through her biographies hoping to find that she’s been happily married and imagining coming up with little stories about her telling her husband “look, I’m just writing this! It’s not about us! It’s not about you!” but, ah, well. That’s not the case. Which makes the poetry even more poignant. She’s writing from the heart and captures flashes and images and makes me say “I have been there.” This poem caught and captured that simply and elegantly and did so like a punch to the gut and it encapsulated that failed relationship from waybackwhen in just 24 lines.
The best poetry can do that.
(Image is “Mock Orange” by Lee Wright. Used under a creative commons license.)
(Continuing education: A Fable. The Empty Glass. The two different Vespers poems. Parable of the Swans.)Report
On reflection, and thinking about some of the Greek poetry you love, I shouldn’t have been surprised. (Especially since we had that whole conversation starting with “what?? YOU like HER???” about 16 years ago or more… we’ve gotten old enough to re-surprise each other, I guess.)Report
I love the “Do you see?” right before it. Is she talking to me the reader or the lover? Were we all made fools of? Definitely a great poem.
I also love the shirt, by the way! Looks like a Nudie Cohn suit. Graham Parsons would have dug it!Report
My embroidered shirts from high school shrunk in the wash.
I’ve since discovered that the cowboy store has picked up where the hippie store has left off.Report
I read the poem so terribly different from you.
You take it as a consensual union — I do not.Report
The climax, so to speak, of that poem, is spectacular. I can’t think of a better description of a failed or failing relationship:
(Have you heard Natalie Prass’ album? In one song she repeats the line, “Our love is a long goodbye” over and over, and it’s pretty much the same thing).
I think I may have mentioned that for several years my youngest brother was with, ultimately engaged to, a poet who is somewhat well known now among academic poets apparently. As a result, he had/has a lot of friends who are poets (including one who lives here now, one seriously odd duck). As a further result, I have had to read a lot of awful contemporary poetry, with the only lessons I’ve learned being that (1) poets are miserable people who hate each other with a petty, insecure passion and (2) they only write for each other. I’m pretty sure these two facts combine to make much of contemporary poetry acts of passive aggression, and that’s why it’s so unreadable. (I say this 2/3 jokingly, but only 2/3.)
I don’t know when the “poets only write for other poets” thing began, but if it was in full force in Glück’s time, she managed to transcend it.Report
Ugh, not meant as a reply to Kim, who clearly hasn’t read the poem.Report
Kim, whenever I’ve seen this poem discussed, it’s about alienation rather than a rape that takes place in the marital bed.
Chris, below, mentions a few of the lines (“split into the old selves” “tired antagonisms”) that imply that it’s mutual but I also look at these:
and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union
She’s dissociated from this, yes… but the dissociation isn’t due to violence.
Here’s Poetry Fix’s take. Both of these people know Gluck personally.
I’m not saying your take is wrong, mind… just that I’ve never seen that take on it before now and I’ve spent a lot of time with this poem.Report
Interesting. Karr mentions rape in a mostly metaphorical sense in that discussion: it’s sex that she (and perhaps they) don’t really want to have, because it’s an imitation of union that quickly dissolves into the actual disunion.Report
Chris,
yeah, that’s a better take on the entire imagery, I must agree.
Sex itself is reductionist, paring humans down to their bare bestial essentials.
I find the act non-consensual, but perhaps it is so for both parties.
Needs and urges forcing a false sense of unity, that breaks as the moment of clarity dissolves.Report
Jay,
alienation is an awesome word for this, but i see just as much alienation from her own body/desires as from her lover.Report
Needs and urges forcing a false sense of unity, that breaks as the moment of clarity dissolves.
Yeah, exactly.Report
One of the things that a fail(ing)ed relationship does to you is make you feel fractured: so much of you knows that it is over, but fear and frustration and a sense of investment make it difficult to listen to that part of yourself, so you stick with it well past the expiration date.
I actually remember a moment very much like that described in the poem, many many years ago. We were lying together, me on my back, her on her side, and the only thing we had in common is that we knew it was over but were lying their anyway. She turned around, took my arm, put it around her, and in that moment the thin veil of pretended ignorance on both are part was ripped in two, and we both knew what we’d known for a while: not only was it over, but this was also painfully clear to both of us. It was quite painful, painful enough that it’s a moment I’ll likely never forget, which is probably why I like this poem so much.Report
Sex itself is reductionist, paring humans down to their bare bestial essentials.
It is if you’re doing it right. 😉
That said, and I don’t say this often, but now that she’s clarified a bit, I can see a little where Kim is coming from, if you bring in that concept of us being helpless slaves to our biology and natures, and the pain that causes us.
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Is orange used in the same manner as in clockwork orange? If so, I am inclined to take a similar view as Kim.Report
No, mock orange is a real (group of) bushes and trees that produce pretty, nice smelling flowers that look like orange blossoms but don’t produce fruit, or produce something inedible (e.g., osage orange trees). The idea is that it looks and smells like an orange blossom but it bears no fruit.Report
There are alot of words that counter love or even frustration:
hate, paralyzing, humiliating, antagonisms
Maybe its a display of how close love and hate are woven, but this feels darker to me, and I feel the inclusion of orange not to be of incident to a poet.Report
Oh, I’m sure it’s not. Glück’s whole philosophy of poetry is to use only the words absolutely necessary, so that her words always have meaning, and usually more than one.Report
Whenever I’ve seen this poem discussed, I’ve never seen that comparison made.
I always have seen it referring to this particular flower:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphus_coronarius
(There’s a link to a picture of it at the bottom of the post.)
It’s a bush that makes a ton of fragrant blossoms that are almost sickly sweet. Some people love the smell. Some people hate it.Report