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The
Mountain
My
students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
Of endless labor. Their expressions
Hardly change; they need to know
A little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
How he was doomed to push
A rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
Would come of this effort
But that he would repeat it
Indefinitely. I tell them
There is joy in this, in the artist's life,
That one eludes
Judgement, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
Slyly pushing it up the steep
Face of a mountain. Why do I lie
To these children? They aren't listening.
They aren't deceived, their fingers
Tapping at the wooden desks--
So I retract
The myth; I tell them it occurs
In hell, and that the artist lies
Because he is obsessed with attainment.
That he perceives the summit
As that place where he will live forever,
A place about to be
Transformed by his burnt: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
Heights to the mountain.
Louise
Glück
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Mt.
Marcy is a peak in the Adirondack Mountains and
the highest point in New York, U.S., reaching an elevation
of 5,344 feet (1,629 metres) above sea level. It lies
in west-central Essex county in the northeastern part
of the state, about 12 miles (19 km) south-southeast
of Lake Placid village. The Hudson River's main headstream,
the Opalescent River, originates on the mountain at
Lake Tear of the Clouds. First ascended in 1837, the
peak was named for William L. Marcy, then governor of
New York who had instituted a geological survey of the
Adirondack region. Mount Marcy is now a popular hiking
destination.
The
reading on Mt. Marcy was organized by Nathalie Costa
with the Adirondack Center and Gerald Schwartz and occured
on July
30, 2002. [Learn
more about the reading]
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After
attending Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York,
and Columbia University, New York City, Louise Glück
taught poetry at numerous colleges and universities.
Her first collection of poetry, Firstborn (1968),
uses a variety of first-person personae, all disaffected
or angry. The collection's tone disturbed many critics,
but Gluck's exquisitely controlled language and imaginative
use of rhyme and metre delighted others. Although its
outlook is equally grim, her collection The House
on Marshland (1975) shows a greater mastery of voice.
There, as in her later volumes, Gluck's personae include
historic and mythic figures such as Gretel and Joan
of Arc. Her adoption of different perspectives became
increasingly imaginative; for example, in "The Sick
Child," from the collection Descending Figure (1980),
her voice is that of a mother in a museum painting looking
out at the bright gallery. The poems in The Triumph
of Achilles (1985), which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award for poetry, address archetypal
subjects of classic myth, fairy tales, and the Bible.
These concerns are also evident in Ararat (1990),
which has been acclaimed for searing honesty in its
examination of the family and the self. Later works
by Gluck include The Wild Iris (1992), Meadowlands
(1996), and The First Five Books of Poems
(1997); she was also editor of The Best American
Poetry 1993 (1993).
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