"Talked to by silence": apocalyptic yearnings in Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris. (Special Feature)

"It is not easy, sir" he said, "to obtain a suitable place, a garden, in which one can work without interference and grow with the seasons. There can't be too many opportunities left any more." --Jerzy Kosinski, Being There In an interview given more than twenty years ago, Louise Gluck said: I've [...] felt the temptation of the Absolute as a danger; the mysticism, the spirituality out of which [...] my best poems will come, has in some ways to be fought. I tried--try--to introduce and reintroduce the earthly, the temporal, because my orientation is always toward the eternal [...]. It has a powerful hold over me [...] the absolute, the eternal, the immutable--that condition which does not exist in the physical world. ("Descending Figure" 119-20) And in her 1994 Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, Gluck remarks: The impulse of our century has been to substitute earth for god as an object of reverence. This seems an implicit rejection of the eternal. But the religious mind, with its hunger for meaning and disposition to awe, its craving for the path, the continuum, the unbroken line, for what is final, immutable, cannot sustain itself on matter and natural process. (21) Since the beginning of her career, this "craving" for that which is "immutable," caught in the grip of "the earthly, the temporal," has been an obsession for Gluck. And in "cast[ing] about for those situations, or myths, that will answer" to that craving, Gluck has found some of her most memorable poems ("Descending Figure" 119). If anything, such an obsession, such a craving, has become more insistent in Gluck's work as time has gone on, and, I would argue, this obsession comes to climax in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Wild Iris (1992), where the mutable and the immutable merge in three powerful and visionary apocalyptic sequences. The Wild Iris is an extremely risky book. Essentially it consists of a trialogue of "voices"--God, the poet, and the flowers in the poet's garden. The flowers provide a kind of arena and act as a kind of referee for the "debate" between the two primary "protagonists," the poet and God. The natural cycle of life, death, and resurrection in a garden thus becomes the literal "ground" for and the frame upon which this "debate" is carried out, while the plants and flowers (pathetic fallacy with a vengeance) actively participate in the "discussion." The dominant dialogue, however, is carried on between the divine and the human protagonist/antagonist, and this dialogic discussion/ debate is stressed through the structure of the book, which is almost equally divided between the two "voices" of these speakers. The "debate" itself centers on the impossibility of any resurrection beyond the human, earthly realm as in a garden. The poems spoken by the poet-protagonist are best described--perhaps inevitably so given the terms of the setting and the identity of the antagonist--as prayers (or anti-prayers), and they are explicitly associated with the Divine Office of the canonical hours. Seven poems are titled "Matins" and ten "Vespers." It is interesting that both matins, the first of the canonical hours, and vespers, the penultimate hour in the Divine Office, are prayers prayed in twilight hours. These two sequences, then, suggest beginnings and ends, ends and beginnings, placed in the contexts of times in which the natural illumination, the literal light, is diminished, blurred, or blotted out. Brought together in such twilit times, these prayer-poems evoke the typical apocalyptic time of a "not yet," even if it is also a time prescient with what is nevertheless an inevitable end--an end vivid in vision but one that, paradoxically, one must survive. As I have suggested elsewhere, One of the paradoxes of the apocalyptic mode is that it is bound up with questions of temporality in general and [. …