Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Louise Glück and Franz Wright read at the Brown Reading Series on March 27. Not being familiar with either poet, I attended this seminar with an open mind. In the end, it was Wright’s poetry that captured my attention more. It was both dark and playful. Playfulness is something I find helpful when listening to poetry read aloud, especially when it has a surface simplicity that is easier to wrap my mind around initially. It’s only through meditating on a poem that I’m able to delve into any deeper meanings and subtexts. Wright’s poetry had these things going for it. Glück’s poems offered a few gems that sounded nice, but I wasn’t sure what they meant. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it would just take further study for me to “get it.”

The post-reading discussion was moderated by Tony Hoagland, who I had forgotten was on the faculty at the University of Houston. His poetry, too, has a touch of that dark playfulness, and I would have liked to hear him read. The April reading will feature UH writing faculty, so perhaps I’ll have the chance to hear him then.

During the discussion, there was a moment when Hoagland referred to Glück and Wright as “confessional poets,” which really set Wright off. He went on about the term being something stupid applied to certain poets by idiots, and perpetuated by idiots who have no original thoughts. Not that Hoagland is one of them, Wright said. “What lyric poet who occasionally uses the word ‘I’ isn’t a confessional poet?” he said. “It makes no sense.”

It was amusing for the audience because we were not on the receiving end of this challenge, or perhaps because, truth be told, we are the idiots who, had we not been told otherwise, would have gone home from this reading to tell our friends about the confessional poets we’d just seen. So we laughed. Hoagland wasn’t laughing, and I thought I read discomfort on his face. I was finally glad when he was able to change the subject.

The last question he posed to the poets was if there is still any cultural function of poetry. Are we just retreading the same themes? Or is there anything new?

Wright had spent much of the evening saying that poetry has shown him that he is not alone, that his experiences are not unique to him and others have walked the same roads before him. He said what’s new are the techniques for describing these experiences. The justification for free verse, he said, is the constant search for new poetic forms.

Glück agreed somewhat. She said new descriptions for old dilemmas are meant to restore their meaning. Not that meaning has fled from these dilemmas, but they’ve grown stale and poetic innovation has served the purpose of reinvigorating meaning.

Tags: franz wright, louise glück, Poetry, reading, writers, Writing

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