front cover of The Poetry of Louise Glück
The Poetry of Louise Glück
A Thematic Introduction
Daniel Morris
University of Missouri Press, 2006
A dominant figure in American poetry for more than thirty-five years, Louise Glück has been the recipient of virtually every major poetry award. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 and was named U.S. poet laureate for 2003–2004. In a full-length study of her work, Daniel Morris explores how this prolific poet utilizes masks of characters from history, the Bible, and even fairy tales.
            Morris treats Glück’s persistent themes—desire, hunger, trauma, survival—through close reading of her major book-length sequences from the 1990s: Ararat, Meadowlands, and The Wild Iris. An additional chapter devoted to The House on Marshland (1975) shows how its revision of Romanticism and nature poetry anticipated these later works. Seeing Glück’s poems as complex analyses of the authorial self via sustained central metaphors, Morris reads her poetry against a narrative pattern that shifts from the tones of anger, despair, and resentment found in her early Firstborn to the resignation of Ararat—and proceeds in her latest volumes, including Vita Nova and Averno, toward an ambivalent embrace of embodied life.
By showing how Glück’s poems may be read as a form of commentary on the meanings of great literature and myth, Morris emphasizes her irreverent attitude toward the canons through which she both expresses herself and deflects her autobiographical impulse. By discussing her sense of self, of Judaism, and of the poetic tradition, he explores her position as a mystic poet with an ambivalent relationship to religious discourse verging on Gnosticism, with tendencies toward the ancient rabbinic midrash tradition of reading scripture. He particularly shows how her creative reading of past poets expresses her vision of Judaism as a way of thinking about canonical texts.
            The Poetry of Louise Glück is a quintessential study of how poems may be read as a form of commentary on the meanings of great literature and myth. It clearly demonstrates that, through this lens of commentary, one can grasp more firmly the very idea of poetry itself that Glück has spent her career both defining and extending.
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front cover of Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture
Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture
Edited by Stephen Paul Miller and Daniel Morris
University of Alabama Press, 2009
"What have I in common with Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself!"
--Franz Kafka

Kafka's quip--paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic--highlights vividly some of the key issues of identity and self-representation for Jewish writers in the 20th century. No group of writers better represents the problems of Jewish identity than Jewish poets writing in the American modernist tradition--specifically secular Jews: those disdainful or suspicious of organized religion, yet forever shaped by those traditions.

This collection of essays is the first to address this often obscured dimension of modern and contemporary poetry: the secular Jewish dimension. Editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller asked their contributors to address what constitutes radical poetry written by Jews defined as "secular," and whether or not there is a Jewish component or dimension to radical and modernist poetic practice in general. These poets and critics address these questions by exploring the legacy of those poets who preceded and influenced them--Stein, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Ginsberg, among others.

While there is no easy answer for these writers about what it means to be a Jew, in their responses there is a rich sense of how being Jewish reflects on their aesthetics and practices as poets, and how the tradition of the avant-garde informs their identities as Jews. Fragmented identities, irony, skepticism, a sense of self as "other" or "outsider," distrust of the literal, and belief in a tradition that questions rather than answers--these are some of the qualities these poets see as common to themselves, the poetry they make, and the tradition they work within.
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front cover of Remarkable Modernisms
Remarkable Modernisms
Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art
Daniel Morris
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
For the authors discussed in Remarkable Modernisms—poets John Yau, Charles Simic, and Mark Strand, and novelists Ann Beattie and Joyce Carol Oates—writing about modern art not only helps to illuminate the work of the artist but also serves as a stimulus to verbal self-portraiture. By revealing as much about their own lives and works as they do about the visual objects reviewed—pieces, for example by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, Alex Katz, Edward Hopper, and George Bellows—the authors studied by Daniel Morris extend the scope of their analysis. In all five cases, writing about art becomes a critical inquiry into the nature of public acts of witnessing and private acts of seeing and not seeing.

While challenging older, rigidly formalist approaches, these authors also diverge from the strictly contextual approaches favored by many contemporary academic critics. As poets and novelists, they remain sensitive to the value of compositional techniques when they address a visual artifact, and they reject the shibboleth of "content" versus "formalist" approaches to art. They reveal that this dichotomy fails to account for the "semantics of form"— the interwoven relationship between the "how" and the "what" of a work of art. Indebted to visual art as a basis for their own compositional discoveries in words, these authors' writings on art have the effect of turning pictures into a language that extends our frame of reference beyond the flat surface of the picture plane to each author's version of contemporary society as social text.
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