Louise Gluck -- Exacting Beauty

By Mary Karr
Sunday, March 30, 2008

As a graduate student in the late 1970s, I watched the tiny, graceful and expensively dressed Louise Gluck ascend to a podium to read "Mock Orange," about the disappointments of marriage. The poem wrung shocked gasps from the audience when the speaker claimed to hate the syrupy aroma of mock orange flowers "as I hate sex."

At a time when obscenity is commonplace, when young girls dress like hookers and video gore prompts little outrage, it's hard to believe how radical these lines sounded back then.

How small this poem is, for Gluck never wastes the reader's time. In Proofs and Theories, her book of essays on poetry, she explains, "I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion. . . ." The way mere ruins of the Coliseum evoke lost grandeur more than a newly articulated structure, or the way a few strokes from Picasso conjure a whole guitar, so Gluck's plain speech makes maximum impact in smallest space.

The orange blossom is the wedding flower, so mock orange is the faux version of real union. The poem opens when the wife -- kept awake by that sickly sweet odor -- tells her husband that it's not the moon troubling her rest but the fake shine of those cloying blossoms.

Only as the poem goes on do we realize the conversation takes place during post-coital tristesse -- the natural sadness after sex that comes from the end of union. It's not sex the speaker despises; it's the fact that physical intimacy can devolve into private lust, and a couple can wind up "split into the old selves,/the tired antagonisms."

MOCK ORANGE

It is not the moon, I tell you.

It is these flowers

lighting the yard.

I hate them.

I hate them as I hate sex,

the man's mouth

sealing my mouth, the man's

paralyzing body--

and the cry that always escapes,

the low, humiliating

premise of union--

In my mind tonight

I hear the question and pursuing answer

fused in one sound

that mounts and mounts and then

is split into the old selves,

the tired antagonisms. Do you see?

We were made fools of.

And the scent of mock orange

drifts through the window.

How can I rest?

How can I be content

when there is still

that odor in the world?

(Louise Gluck's poem "Mock Orange" can be found in "The Triumph of Achilles." Ecco. Copyright 1985 by Louise Gluck. "Proofs and Theories." Ecco. Copyright 1994 by Louise Gluck.)

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."