Meadowlands
Poet: Louise Glück
First-timer? Curious how to use this poetry guidebook? Read this.
Recommending Meadowlands as a good first Louise Glück book, given that it’s relatively character and plot driven. A current favorite. Let’s dive in —
🧭 Pre-read:
Imagine the book as an opera. If you can identify who’s speaking which parts, you’ll be able to fill in the narrative.
🗺 Summary:
Meadowlands overlays the stories of two couples and two relationships: one classical and one contemporary.
The “top” level narrative follows Penelope & Odysseus – husband leaving wife (to war), husband and his suitors, wife and her suitors, husband reuniting with wife. The “bottom” level narrative follows the speaker and her ex-husband – their quarrels, their fallout, their meeting again post-divorce.
The featured voices — spanning the epic and the mundane — showcase love’s bitterness, its envy, its ego. And I love Meadowlands for that. I love its refusal to romanticize and its choice to portray a difficult adult love — love without the tropes of star-crossed sappiness poetry is (often rightfully) accused of.
That’s not to say Meadowlands is all bitterness either. In the collection’s final poem, the speaker, pitching her then-husband on hosting a house-party, imagines:
For one night, affection will triumph over passion. The passion will all be in the music. If you can hear the music you can imagine the party. I have it all planned: first violent love, then sweetness. First Norma then maybe the Lights will play. (Poems 359)
These closing lines summarize Meadowlands precisely — as an operatic soundtrack beginning with violent love and ending with this wish for affection and sweetness. A wish which, by then in the book, the reader knows goes unfulfilled.
🗂 Analysis: Voice and the Void in Meadowlands
Novice readers looking to understand poetry often struggle with a genre I call voice poems. Unlike visual poems (e.g. William Carlos Williams “red wheelbarrow glazed with rain”), voice poems do not operate on an image-basis. They refute the creative writing maxim “show, don’t tell” by telling, not showing. Their key to understanding begins with the question, who’s speaking? And then, what are they saying? In short, voice poems should be read with the ear and not the eye.
Apt across her oeuvre, the emphasis on voice over vision is particularly true to Louise Glück’s 7th collection Meadowlands, which takes the conceit of opera in depicting the end-stages of marriage. My advice to readers is: listen, don’t look. Then, even the most opaque poems will become clear and reveal a vivid and dynamic cast of characters — Penelope (stoic, stubborn), Circe (resilient, vengeful), the protagonist and her ex-husband (sarcastic, combative), and more.
Take the poem “Siren” as a case in point, which begins with the declaration:
I became a criminal when I fell in love. Before that I was a waitress. I didn’t want to go to Chicago with you. I wanted to marry you, I wanted your wife to suffer. (Poems 328)
Even without imagery (there are none here), these opening lines instantly resurrect the impression of an outcast lover, a modern siren. By sound first, we can begin to construct a character — someone heartbroken but not morose, bitter but not humorless, self-centered yet self-aware.
“[W]e don’t follow poems as arguments, step by step. We grasp them entire, and what we first grasp is tone,” Glück writes in “Disruption, Hesitation, and Silence” (P&T). Sparse in imagery, the difficulty of Meadowlands lies in the challenge in identifying its speakers by voice and navigating its poems aurally. The genius of Meadowlands is its invention of a captivating new tone.
On the creation of tone, it is helpful to refer to Glück’s analysis of poet Robert Pinksy. “For most of this century, poets have been divesting themselves of the arsenal of devices that had come to seem static or imprisoning. What remains is tone, the medium of the soul,” Glück asserts. “Set aside, for the moment, the fact that very few poets are capable of evolving even a single unprecedented tone [...] Because Pinsky isn’t using tone as an instrument of hasty self-portraiture, tone is hard to fix, fluid: for all their dazzling aural pleasure, these are not poems made to be acted out in Theater 101” (AO).
Something similar is achieved in Meadowlands as the voice of Glück’s siren re-emerges and is transformed in various subsequent poems. In “Purple Bathing Suit,” an inner-monologue, the husband fumes as he watches his wife:
stare into space in the tidy rows of the vegetable garden, ostensibly working hard while actually doing the worst job possible, I think you are a small irritating purple thing and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth because you are all that’s wrong with my life and I need you and I claim you. (Poems 328)
Can you hear that? The dynamism of the speaker’s tone as it twists, pivots, and drives into that two-pronged ending. The ending line, which is charged with some of the same possessive energy and self-righteous anger in “Siren.” As in Pinsky’s poems, the persisting tone in Meadowlands is unfixable, fluid, evolving — emerging through both the voices of the abandoned (“Siren”, “Circe’s Power”) and the voices of the abandoner (“Purple Bathing Suit”). In this way, tone operates as both the unifying force within a single poem as well as the recurring, fragmentary pattern drawn across the entire collection, giving Meadowlands its quality of sonic unity and variability – no easy achievement.
At this point, we zero-ed into a couple poems — equivalent to a couple arias in an opera soundtrack— and identified some tonal themes. There is still much to be said about Meadowlands when we listen to it as a collection, as a whole. What Glück identifies, in Pinksy, as “larger musical analogies, the way, in poem after poem, one figure answers another figure, like jazz improvisations,” we may also recognize in Meadowlands (AO).
The three titular poems (“Meadowlands 1-3”), internally structured as call-and-response poems (or duets), when divided across the book act as a sort of refrain. “The Butterfly” — alone, a lackluster couple of lines — is made resonant only when counterposed with “The Wish” (the killer ending couplet). The “dazzling aural pleasure” of Meadowlands comes from these internal layers of sound — one voice responding to another, refuting another, asserting another — across poems, worlds (classical/contemporary), and times (pre/post divorce). These layers of speech generate the orchestral, operatic quality Glück cites as an influence as early as the epigraph: “Let’s play choosing music. Favorite form. / Opera.” (Poems 305).
Of course, on the other side of speech is silence. In Meadowlands, the myriad manifestations of the speaker's tone must still run against margins, against silence. The call-and-response poem must operate at the two ends of blank space. The single-voiced poems, too, act in tension with the void.
The poem “Midnight” dramatizes the perils of silence and the necessity of speech. Crying in the garage with the garbage, the speaker chides herself:
is this the way you communicate with your husband, not answering when he calls, or is this the way the heart behaves when it grieves: it wants to be alone with the garbage? If I were you, I’d think ahead. After fifteen years, his voice could be getting tired; some night if you don’t answer, someone else will answer. (Poems 327)
A call-and-response poem with no response, “Midnight” warns against one-sided dialogue, the voice without its pair. To speak is to be in relationship (with the world, with one’s partner) and to be silent is to be out-of-sync, out-of-touch. As the protagonist’s husband uncharitably suggests at one point in the book, “You should take one of those chemicals, / maybe you’d write more. / Maybe you have some kind of void syndrome” (Poems 348). Implicit, here, is the notion that the void is specifically a space of tonal negation – where the absence of tone threatens both the speaker’s literary vocation and her marriage.
Yet, Meadowlands’ relationship with the void is not altogether antagonistic either. In “Quiet Evening,” the void operates not as a threat but rather as a figure of the future. Juxtaposing Meadowlands’ contemporary and classical couples, “Quiet Evening” memorializes each pair in their mirror gestures, in a moment of togetherness before each of their immanent partings:
You take my hand […] So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus, not to hold him back but to impress this peace on his memory: from this point on, the silence through which you move is my voice pursuing you. (Poems 309)
To enter the void is to enter futurity — uncertain, unknowable, infinite. In this way, Odysseus leaves to sea. In this way, the speaker and her husband leave their quiet evening. “Quiet Evening” is tuned the fleetingness of these moments — an hour of peace, a singular speech — while reminding us of the staying power of memory, of a voice which pursues.
In “Quiet Evening” and throughout Meadowlands, voice operates in the void as human experience operates in infinitude — by and of itself, complete, yet also part of a larger composition. Or as Glück writes on Pinsky, “against the background of the eternal, the void, stories are musical phrases, simultaneously completed formal shapes and inconclusive fragments” (AO).
Abbreviations
P&T - Glück, Louise. “Disruption, Hesitation, and Silence.” Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry. HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.
AO - Glück, Louise. “Story Telling.” American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2020.
Poems - Glück, Louise. Poems 1962-2012. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013.