Louise Glück, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards Each volume year, we honor the best short story and poem published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners -- each of whom receives a cash prize of $600 -- are selected by our advisory editors. The 1996 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 21 go to:

Louise Glück for her poem "Penelope's Stubbornness" in Winter 1995-96, edited by Tim O'Brien & Mark Strand.

Louise Glück was born in New York City in 1943, raised on Long Island, and attended Sarah Lawrence College for six weeks before dropping out. About her incomplete formal education, she says wryly, "It wasn't a confident dismissal of a ritual I didn't need or had bohemian contempt for. I was, at eighteen, too advanced in neurosis to manage life outside my bedroom. My education, such as it was, was psychoanalysis, augmented by a series of miraculous workshops at Columbia's School of General Studies, first with Leonie Adams, then with Stanley Kunitz."

Glück is the author of a book of essays, Proofs and Theories, and eight collections of poetry, including The Triumph of Achilles, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985; The Wild Iris, which received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1993; and Meadowlands, which was released this year from Ecco Press, her publisher since 1975. She has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Iowa, and Williams College, and has made Vermont her home for many years, although, beginning this fall, she will be living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a trial period.

"To talk about 'Penelope's Stubbornness,' " Glück writes, "I have to talk about Meadowlands. The poems that became that book, having been conceived almost immediately in terms of that book, were written in about five main clusters, the first a lively and absorbing flurry in the summer of, I think, 1993 in Vermont; the last, two weeks of euphoric sleeplessness in Cambridge -- in buses, in cars, and, mostly, in Tom and Vera Kreilkamp's wonderful guest room -- a period that ended in bronchitis when the book ended. I was, that spring, encouraged by the enthusiasm and sharply focused criticism of Robert Pinsky and Frank Bidart; enthusiasm hadn't been, at the outset, what this work attracted (except from fiction writers, perhaps because implicit structure is what they're used to recognizing). I had begun, it seemed, to write that way; I could hear Meadowlands very early, but what I heard was a graph of tone, so that for several years I felt haunted, tormented, like someone who can remember a song, but not its name, and not its words. In this case, a very long song.

" 'Penelope's Stubbornness' was written rather early, though not in that first summer's work, and it was written easily, being one of the pieces compelled by the overall narrative (as opposed to tonal) design: finding the various tones or attitudes, I felt like an explorer; fleshing out the drama, I felt like a craftsperson. Restful, interesting, but not overwhelming. This poem was part of a more sustained duet between women, a stand-off, a fight for dominance which is (in my head) a fight also to have the last word."