The Sewanee Review is honoring Louise Glück, one of the most lauded poets in the United States today, with the 2010 Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry.  The public is invited to attend the presentation to Glück on Thursday, Nov. 4, at 4:30 p.m. in Convocation Hall, followed by her reading and a reception. On Wednesday, Nov. 3, David Yezzi will give a lecture, “The Measure of Louise Glück,” at 8 p.m. in the McGriff Alumni House, also followed by a reception. Glück’s books will be available for purchase at both events.  Glück’s poetry, remarkable for its simple lines, painstaking diction and wrenching emotion, has unified themes as broad as disintegrating family relationships and the struggle to find meaning in daily life, with the personae of the Odyssey and the myths of Persephone and Orpheus.  Glück’s controlled use of language—“sparse lines, simple syntax, beautiful sounds”—has been aptly described as “an aesthetic of reticence.” Glüc traces her interest in mythology back to her childhood on Long Island, when her father recounted classical Greco-Roman mythology to his two daughters. Her focus on mythological fi gures and her use of archetypal narratives allow her to explore her own marriage, her own childhood, and her own concerns about and fear of death. By creating a menagerie of classical personae, she is able to universalize the intimately personal. In fact, Glück is troubled by the ego and thinks “most contemporary poetry is horrifically disfigured by it.” She says, “I would like to write poetry that was intensely personal and seemed absolutely devoid of egotism.”  In addition to her work as a poet,  Glück has made a considerable imprint on contemporary American letters as an educator and as a champion of young writers. Aside from teaching in the creative writing programs at Boston University, the University of Iowa and Goddard College in Vermont, Glück taught at Williams College for 20 years, and she currently leads seminars in creative writing at Yale University. In 2003, Glück was appointed judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets; her first selection was “The Cuckoo” by Peter Streckfus. Streckfus will be on campus to introduce Glück at the Aiken Taylor Award presentation.  During a span of more than 40 years, Glück has published 11 books of poetry, most recently, “A Village Life,” as well as a collection of essays, “Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry” (1994), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. Her work has received numerous tributes: “The Wild Iris” (1993) won the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award; “The Triumph of Achilles” (1985) won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and “Averno” (2006) was nominated for the National Book Award. In 2008 Glück received the Wallace Stevens

Award for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Along with Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, recognition from the National Endowment for the Arts,  the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University, Glück served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004.  Glück is the 24th recipient of this prize and follows such important writers as Donald Hall, Wendell Berry, Gwendolyn Brooks and Maxine Kumin. Through the generosity of . P. A. Taylor (brother of poet Conrad Aiken), the Sewanee Review established this annual award in 1987, honoring a distinguished American poet for the work of a career. Howard Nemerov was the fi rst poet honored and was followed by Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and W. S. Merwin.