The intimate voice of poetry

 I’m always on the prowl for one-night reads — interesting alternatives to an evening of TV sitcoms and lost hours on the Internet.

Here’s a suggestion: Louise Glück’s 2020 Nobel Lecture. It’s short.

Glück argues that poetry is the intimate voice of private life, and that we’re in danger of losing it as our lives become increasingly public. It contains this sentence:

I am talking about a temperament that distrusts public life or sees it as the realm in which generalization obliterates precision, and partial truth replaces candor and charged disclosure.

I spent my working life as a newspaperman, working to make things public, to resolve differences in public and to examine public life. But I understand that deep distrust of public life. And that experience examining public life might be one reason that I love poetry so.

• Sources: The lecture is here:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/lecture/

For more on one-night reads, see the series of notes and recommendations from Oct. 28 through Nov. 2, 2021.