A few thoughts on the Nobel lecture

A beautiful thing about poems is how they can be unruly—how, as things in the world, they can attach themselves to all kinds of possibilities outside of (even in contradiction to) the contexts in which they were forged.

There's a wide opening I often find in Glück's poems. What this speech did, for me, was to, in no uncertain terms, situate the wideness of that possibility as an imperial wideness—a wideness of entitlement, minstrelsy, mastery.

I am reading this speech as a critical text on Glück's own poetics, in particular, as well as one that makes visible (yet again) a broader strain of white women's poetics where claims a kind of universal interior are haunted and conditioned by the specter of anti-Blackness.

& I'm thinking, too, of these lines from Solmaz Sharif, from [Persian Letters]:

"We make them reveal
the brutes they are, Aleph, by the things
we make them name." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57580/persian-letters