{"id":69624,"date":"2025-12-13T06:19:28","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T06:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/69624\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T06:19:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T06:19:28","slug":"i-think-this-poem-is-kind-of-into-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/69624\/","title":{"rendered":"I Think This Poem Is Kind of Into You"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t \"A.O.<\/a> <\/p>\n

By A.O. Scott<\/a> <\/p>\n

A.O. Scott, a critic at large for the Book Review, recorded the poem that appears in this piece.<\/p>\n

Dec. 11, 2025 <\/p>\n

A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and \u2014 maybe especially \u2014 the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.<\/p>\n

The inner and outer forecasts don\u2019t always match up. This short poem by Louise Gl\u00fcck starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.<\/p>\n

And then it bursts into flame.<\/p>\n

\u201cEarly December in Croton-on-Hudson\u201d comes from Gl\u00fcck\u2019s debut collection, \u201cFirstborn,\u201d which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters \u2014 sex, love, illness, family life \u2014 that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn\u2019t flinch. She also doesn\u2019t explain.<\/p>\n

Here, for example, Gl\u00fcck assembles fragments of experience that imply \u2014 but also obscure \u2014 a larger narrative. It\u2019s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.<\/p>\n

We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It\u2019s hard not to wonder if they\u2019re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.<\/p>\n

To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of \u201cEarly December in Croton-on-Hudson\u201d that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Gl\u00fcck\u2019s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Gl\u00fcck, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.<\/p>\n

Louise Gl\u00fcck in 1975.<\/p>\n

Gerard Malanga<\/p>\n

But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after \u201cFirstborn,\u201d on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Gl\u00fcck celebrated the \u201cintimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine\u201d relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for \u201cpoems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the kind of poem she wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cConfidence\u201d can have two meanings, both of which apply to \u201cEarly December in Croton-on-Hudson.\u201d Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.<\/p>\n

Where there is power, there\u2019s also risk. To give voice to desire \u2014 to whisper or cry \u201cI want you\u201d \u2014 is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It\u2019s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.<\/p>\n

What happens next? That\u2019s up to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By A.O. Scott A.O. Scott, a critic at large for the Book Review, recorded the poem that appears…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[36024,36022,36023,9,11,10,36021,3467,36025],"class_list":{"0":"post-69624","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-croton-on-hudson-ny","9":"tag-gluck","10":"tag-louise","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-news","14":"tag-poetry-and-poets","15":"tag-vis-design","16":"tag-winter-season"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}