Louise Glück's "Telemachus' Detachment"
Thoughts on the “but also” of life.
Telemachus' Detachment
When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also insane. Also very funny. from Meadowlands (Ecco, 1996)
I remember the first time I read Louise Glück’s poems. I was in graduate school, in my first seminar class on poetry. I was new to poetry, having entered the program as a fiction writer, and one of the only required books for the course I was about to take was Glück’s Collected — this beautiful book, with the rings of Saturn on the cover, and a spine that made you scared to even try to bend it. We read “October;” I remember that we did. I remember reading it and feeling moved that we were reading it in some spiritual sense, as if it were beyond me already, with no hope of grasping it.
In the middle of that poem is this series of stanzas:
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. Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer; bounty, balm after violence. Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields have been harvested and turned. Tell me this is the future, I won’t believe you. Tell me I’m living, I won’t believe you.
I’ve returned to these lines many times after I first read them in that class. In those moments of returning, I’ll be struck by one phrase — violence has changed me — after another — Tell me I’m living, / I won’t believe you. This poem and these lines — they do offer something spiritual; I believe that. They capture, as so much of Glück’s poetry does, that particular sense of being alive that comes when what you recognize as life feels almost unrecognizable to yourself. You are living, but you don’t believe it. You are laughing in the midst of the deepest sorrow. You are crying just seconds after a moment of unnameable joy.
Louise Glück passed away just over two weeks ago. When I first heard of her passing, I thought of this poem today. It is my favorite poem of Glück’s, if that is even possible. I don’t think it is. And so I will revise that statement. It is simply the poem I am thinking about today, and often. I will paste it again, in full, below:
When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also insane. Also very funny.
One beauty of poetry is the way a poem can age with you, or the way that you can age alongside a poem — the way you can return to a poem, or a song, or a piece of art, and feel moved by it, yes, feel more moved or less moved, feel moved differently or at times not at all, and feel — in all of this feeling — the memory of being moved for the first time. Do you know what I mean? It’s like how, lying down in a MRI tube earlier today, I was asked if I wanted to listen to music to block out the incessant metallic noise of the test. The technician asked which artist I wanted to listen to, and I said Springsteen — my first favorite. And there I was, with huge headphones playing a barely audible, tinny version of “Thunder Road,” a song I burned onto nearly every CD of my childhood, thinking about how, lying there, I was over two decades older than I was on the day I heard this song for the first time, and maybe it is because I was vulnerable and feeling a little like a child in that vulnerability, but lying there, with the tinny music interrupted by the machine, I almost cried. I felt moved like I had been moved the first time. I felt ready for it, ready for what it would open within me. Which is another way of saying I was not ready, which is how I feel when I moved. Not ready for the feeling, but grateful.
I am thinking of that because I hear today’s poem as a refrain in my head all of the time. Heartbreaking. Insane. Funny. “Also / very funny.”
I hear it, somewhere lodged in the back of my brain, when I am talking to my mom on the phone, or when I am teaching. I feel in conversation with it when I am reading student work, or talking to my wife about family. When I laugh, which I try to do often, I sometimes think of this poem, especially when I laugh when no one else does, or when it is supposed — by who, I wonder — that perhaps I should not laugh. I laugh sometimes when I am uncomfortable, or when I am thinking of difficult things. I sometimes smile when I am thinking of a very serious question. It is a funny life, this is. I have come to believe that it has to be. I think of this poem when I think such thoughts, which I think often. I think of this poem often.
And it’s funny — I’ve read this poem countless times, but looking at it today, I’m struck by this moment, simple and pure:
you know what I thought?
I’m struck by the casual nature of it, the sense of conversation — a shoulder bumped into mine as the question is asked. I’ve never really considered how casual this question is, how it omits the do of do you know. And maybe it’s funny, because I’ve never considered Glück a casual poet. But perhaps it is because she has passed away, and is gone now, that this brief and momentary, almost flippant little remark feels so moving to me now. No, I want to say, I don’t know. But I want to. Who do I say that to? I say it to myself, and I keep reading.
Poems are little ghosts we leave behind of the people we once were or continue to be. Sometimes, looking at a poem I wrote years ago, I find myself surprised by a line. I forget the self that wrote it; I sometimes cannot believe that it was me. And I forget the moment, too. That brief and glimmering moment of surprise, when you held the indescribable in a phrase. But the poem reminds me that the self lived, and that the moment was. It reminds me that I was there, and that I am still here, reading. I think of this short poem by Franz Wright that ends:
How does one go about dying? Who on earth is going to teach me— The world is filled with people who have never died
The world is instead filled with people who continue to go on living. Poems, then, become these strange and beautiful instruction manuals for such a thing. I think of today’s poem as a similar manual. When I read it, I’m reminded of what changes and what does not. Notice the dual repetition of heartbreaking in today’s poem, how Glück stacks each same word on top of the other. It’s there, always, the heartbreak. But then notice the word that’s repeated next. It’s not insane, not funny. It’s also. I like this little reminder. Also. Also. The poem moves into bigness. It allows. As the poem progresses, short thing it is, it lets the world be not just heartbreaking, but also insane, also funny. No, there are no contradictions here. No subtractions. Just the world growing to hold space for all it is.
I’m thinking of the ending to Glück’s poem, “An Endless Story,” from her final book of poems:
Look at us, she said. We are all of us in this room still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love. We search for it all of our lives, even after we find it.
The searching of this poem is like the also of today’s. It is like the way today’s poem thinks not once, but twice. How it revises itself as part of the poem. Love, too, is like revision. Maybe this is why Glück reminds us of how we search for love even after we find it. Because we are changed by what we find, continually revised, continually made into people who are searching for revision. A poem, too — and poems written over the course of a life: these, too — a kind of reminder of our revision.
All of this makes me think of the final lines from Glück’s poem, “The Wish”:
I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem.
Another poem means another chance to describe and revise a life. Another chance to speak of light. Another chance to allow. Another chance to permit. Another chance to let a life grow into whatever it is, into whatever it might become. Another chance to think about the space between. Another chance to question, to ask, to say do you know what I thought. It’s a beautiful chance to get to write, a beautiful chance to get to read.
There is something about this life that breaks my heart each day. There are endless reminders of this fact, reminders at once ordinary and extraordinary. I think that is why I am drawn to this poem today — because it validates such noticing. It reminds me that the heartbreak is real. But it also reminds me to look again. And not just at others, but at myself. The title — “Telemachus’ Detachment” — calls to mind a wayward son looking at his parents, navigating such distance. But then the poem gently makes the point that the son will one day age into being the object of such perception. Someone who lives amidst heartbreak and absurdity at the same time, someone whose life could be funny if they acknowledge it as such. We are — sometimes, maybe often — what we observe. Poems remind me of this. That we certainly are how we observe.
When I read Glück’s poem today — and when I am reminded of it throughout the days of my ordinary life — I am reminded of how much a life can be, how much and how varied. I am reminded that what breaks my heart today might be something I laugh about in years. I am reminded that life is filled with so many but also’s — so many moments that are not just what they are, but are also so much else. It gives me permission to be the one in the room trying to smile, even while acknowledging heartbreak. I have to believe that this is a beautiful thing, that life can be like this, which is to say that it does not need to be just one thing, just one feeling. It reminds me that we need holding just as much as we need to be doubled over, coughing out our laughter. Joy can be right around the corner — always. It has to be.
Some Notes:
As mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I have found this website to be profoundly helpful in contextualizing the ongoing conflict in Gaza. I also found both this piece by the poet Hala Alyan in New York Times to be worth reading, and this digital toolkit to be worth looking at to see how it intersects with your desire to show solidarity for those in Palestine.
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God! Devin, this is one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever read
Beautiful reflections, poems and fragments. To write something as simple and perpetual as " I wished for what I always wish for. / I wished for another poem." is just 🤌. One of the many gifts from Glück. Thank you!