Close Readings - A Recommendation
Second in a series
Recently, I embarked on what in effect was a speed reading of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, not only to meet a monthly reading challenge, but also to see if reading all of Stevens in a compressed time frame would increase my appreciation for and understanding of his often inscrutable poems. Indeed it did; it’s helpful on occasion to not stop and parse every line, but instead to let the sweep of the poet’s images and ideas work their magic.
However, I would never recommend this speed-reading strategy to those of you still seeking a way into poetry. Instead, today I celebrate a strategy (via a particular recommendation) that can work equally well for both the novice and the devotee, the close reading podcast. As regular readers of these Musings might recall, I’ve been recently enjoying the poetry of the late Nobel Prize winning poet Louise Gluck. I’ve suggested before that You Tube is a place to go any time you want to hear and see more about virtually any topic, and indeed there’s no shortage of material on Louise Gluck there. But, I daresay the same overall idea can extend to the world of the podcast. On Spotify, I searched for “close readings Louise Gluck,” and found myself seconds later immersed in the podcast series “Close Readings,” hosted by professor and critic Kamran Javadizadeh, where he and poet Elisa Gonzalez introduced me to the poem “A Village Life,” from the collection of the same name by Gluck (Here’s the Spotify link:). The podcast, which includes two complete readings of the poem, one by Gluck herself, runs for one and three-quarter hours, which on first blush might seem overly long for a poem of two and one-half pages. If anything, though, I found much about the poem that Javadizadeh and Gonzales didn’t have time to address, which allowed me to further reflect on “A Village Life” and draw even closer to its world.
As always seems to be the case with me, this one podcast spun off into a number of other podcasts, poems, and videos. Elisa Gonzalez was a student of Gluck’s, and talked fondly of their relationship and Gluck’s influence on Gonzalez’ poetry. It made me seek out Gonzalez’ debut poetry collection Grand Tour, which is in my to-read pile. I also listened to two other episodes of “Close Readings,” one on Stevens’ “Man Carrying Thing,” and another on James Merrill’s late poem “Christmas Tree,” a poem in the shape of, and told from the perspective of, the tree. The latter episode sees Javadizadeh in conversation with Merrill biographer Langdon Hammer, who taught Eliza Gonzalez at Yale, which led me to Hammer’s series of lectures on modern poetry at Yale, where I furthered my Wallace Stevens immersion by watching on You Tube a series of three lectures on the poet, replete with various close readings.
If you can only take me up on one idea here, at least watch Louise Gluck read “A Village Life”: