Pulitzer Poet Reads at Hillel

Renowned poet Louise Glück read from her newly-reased collection “Averno: Poems” at Harvard Hillel last night, in the first of a series of talks celebrating National Poetry Month sponsored by the Harvard Book Store.

Glück, a former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, read two long poems and two short poems for 30 minutes to an audience mostly comprising members of the Cambridge community that filled Beren Hall’s approximately 170 seats.

“I think of myself as a spirit disguised in a human body,” Glück told the audience. She recounted that, when a translator asked her which gender she would prefer to be used in a Polish version of her poems, she answered: “Whatever makes the best of the pronoun, so that pronoun speaks to a human experience, not to a female experience.”

Most of Glück’s collections, including “Averno,” have a central theme that runs through a series of long poems. Averno is volcanic crater in Italy that the Romans believed to lead to the underworld.

Underpinning the book is the myth of Greek goddess Persephone, who spends half the year with her husband, Hades, god of the underworld, and the other half with her mother Demeter, the harvest goddess.

From her poem “Landscape,” Glück wrote:

“In the silence of consciousness I asked myself,

why did I reject my life? And I answer

Die Erde überwältigt mich:

the earth defeats me.”

Her reading was “fantastic,” said Karyn Jones, a teacher at Bunker Hill Community College and longtime Glück fan. Jones still remembered the first time she listened to Glück recite, more than 10 years ago in Saratoga, N.Y.

“She is one of my all time favorite poets,” Jones said while waiting in the line to get her copy of “Averno” signed. Glück signed copies of “Averno” for about half the audience.

Glück was appointed the poet laureate of the United States in 2003, and Averno is her 11th poetry collection. Among other honors, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1992 collection “The Wild Iris,” and the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1985 collection “The Triumph of Achilles.”

A longtime resident of Cambridge, Glück does not make many public appearances. She taught at Williams College from 1983 to 2003, commuting to the western Massachusetts campus. In 2004, she became the Rosencranz writer in residence at Yale.