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Vita Nova, Louise Gluck's eighth book of poems, begins with this enigmatic exchange between master and apprentice.
The master said You must write what you see.
But what I see does not move me.
The master answered Change what you see.
Change is Louise Gluck's highest value. Each of her books has begun, she admits, in a "conscious diagnostic act, a swearing off" of the work preceding it. But because of what Gluck calls in Vita Nova her "inflexible Platonism," she is both entranced and threatened by "something beyond the archetype." If change is what she most craves, it is also what she most resists, what is most difficult for her, most hard-won. And if her career has often moved forward at the expense of its own past, Vita Nova feels like the inauguration of a different kind of movement. Rather than retreating to an extreme of diction or sensibility, the poems of Vita Nova ultimately feel at home in a fluctuating middle ground that is not a compromise between extremes. Near the end of the book, the apprentice recognizes that she has internalized the lesson of the master.
I have acquired in some measure
the genius of the master, in whose supple mind
time moves in two directions: backward
from the act to the motive
and forward to just resolution.
These lines characterize two narratives: one involves the place of Vita Nova in Gluck's ongoing career and the other is the story Vita Nova itself tells. To write what you see you must first change what you see. And if the past is the poet's subject, then the past must change: the inflexible Platonist must realize that the givens of experience are potentially as fluid, as mutable, as its possibilities. "I couldn't even / imagine the past," Gluck admits at one point in Vita Nova. At another, when she asks herself if she feels free, all she can respond is that she recognizes the patterns of her experience. Throughout her career, Gluck has often shown how the future runs on rails that are laid down not only in childhood but in lives preceding our own. But in Vita Nova the act of imagining the future is contingent upon the act of reimagining-rather than rejecting-the...