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Louise Glück

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Poet

The Resume

    (April 22, 1943-October 13, 2023)
    Born in New York City, New York
    Poetry collections include ‘Firstborn’ (1968), ‘The House on Marshland’ (1975), ‘The Triumph of Achilles’ (1985), ‘The Wild Iris’ (1992), ‘Meadowlands’ (1997), ‘October’ (2004), ‘Averno’ (2006), and ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’ (2014)
    US Poet Laureate (2003-04)
    Won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2020)
    Last name rhymes with ‘click,’ not ‘cluck’

Why she might be annoying:

    She developed anorexia as a teen.
    She attended Sarah Lawrence and Columbia without getting a degree from either college.
    She experienced writers block for three years after publishing her first poetry collection.
    She suggested new readers avoid her first book ‘unless they want to feel contempt.’
    She was married and divorced twice.
    She dislikes doing public readings of her poems: ‘I can’t, with my limited human instrument, convey what I feel.’
    Her most frequent themes are death, loss, rejection, and the failure of relationships.

Why she might not be annoying:

    She lost all her possessions when a fire destroyed her home (1980).
    With poets Rita Dove and W.S. Merwin, she was a consultant for the Library of Congress’ bicentennial celebration (1999).
    Poet Robert Hass called her ‘One of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.’
    She has received just about every award available to a poet: in addition to the Nobel Prize, she won the Pulitzer Prize (1993), the Bollingen Prize (2001), the National Book Award (2014), and the National Humanities Medal (2015).
    When first asked what winning the Nobel Prize meant to her, she said she really had no response because she had not yet had her first coffee of the day. (‘That's too big and it's too early here. It's barely 7 o'clock.’)

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 29 Votes: 51.72% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 5 Votes: 40.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 19 Votes: 68.42% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying