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Louise Glück Writer

Louise Elisabeth Glück (born April 22, 1943) is an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. Gluck has openly aligned herself to the school of Objectivist poets to which other poets like Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Carl Rakosi belong. The Objectivist poet, as defined by Zukofsky, strives to "treat poems as an object, and to emphasise sincerity, intelligence and the poet’s ability to look clearly at the world" by exploiting the resonances of small everyday words. In one of her essays in Proof and Theories praising George Oppen, Glück states her partiality towards any kind of poetry that "approaches silence and verges on disappearance." Tony Hoagland, a literary critic and contemporary poet. describes Glück’s poetic ability, as one that lies in the creation of terse and condensed dramatic forces. Critic Daniel Morris in "Dedication to Hunger: The Poetry of Louis Glück" develops the relation between economy of language and the economy of flesh through themes of starvation of the body in Glück’s poetics. Poets like Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti have also demonstrated this poetics of "anorexia minimalism" in language. This behaviour can be understood through the patriarchal restrictions set upon the female where self-starvation and renunciation becomes a form of protest.In an article in the Women’s Review of Books, Donna Krolick Hollenberg mentions that the use of "repeated negatives remind us that Glück is a practised poet of the negative way." ("Negative Capability" was explained by John Keats as the state “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”