That Which Haunts: On Louise Glück

Poetry, the American poet Louise Glück once told an audience, a member of whom had, preposterously, asked her to define it, ‘is that which haunts’. The response itself haunts, not least for being strikingly satisfactory. It ‘seems true and deep’, to borrow a phrase of Glück’s, from her essay ‘Death and Absence’. It begins in indeterminacy (‘that which’) and then tapers to a verb (‘haunts’) that is both distinctive and a little mysterious, achieving the air of the irrefutable while ‘loosing a flurry of questions’ (another of Glück’s phrases, this one from her essay ‘Ersatz Thought’). At once distilled and capacious, laconic and expansive, Glück’s definition of poetry shares many of the qualities of her poems.