Wesleyan with enough acclaim to practically fill the University’s Memorial Chapel. Avid students and reverent professors filed into the Chapel Wednesday night to hear Gluck [pronounced “Gli-ck”] read selections from her latest book of poetry, “Averno.”

Gluck’s former student at Williams, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies John Vincent, introduced the poet briefly. Characterizing her work as both “unsettling” and “unsettled,” Vincent praised his mentor’s ability to “deftly manage” technical ability and emotional turmoil, to meld clarity with “life’s messy stuff.”

Gluck’s reading, of course, proved what most of the Chapel—and the country—already knew: she is quite a poet. Gluck read six selections from “Averno”, her as-of-yet unpublished latest collection of poems, which explores the Underworld of Greek myth. Also known as Hades or Averno, this Land of the Shades represented death for the Greeks but also a place of eternal life and contemplation within that death. Many of the poems in the book deal explicitly with the Persephone myth, in which the beautiful young daughter of Zeus and Demeter is taken away to the Averno as Hades’ bride against the wishes of her mother. All of the selections tackled in some way passage, change, and self-knowledge.

“Maybe just not being is simply enough/hard as that is to imagine,” suggested one line from the first poem Gluck read, “The Night Migrations.” In “October,” a vivdly visual six-sectioned poem that followed the poet’s varying perspective on life as the seasons progress, Gluck repeated the powerful refrain, “violence has changed me.” Later in that same poem, she said slowly, “death cannot harm me more than you/ have harmed me, my beloved life.”The reading was not a joyful one. Judging by her selection of poems to read, Gluck’s new book is somewhat bleak. But the doubts she voices in painfully personal poems crowded with rhetorical questions—sometimes directed at an anonymous “you,” sometimes more inwardly aimed—account for the poet’s gravity.

“She is a person profoundly troubled by the problem of God,” said David Langston, a friend of the poet and fellow professor at Williams. “[Gluck understands] God to be a metaphorical construction that vies the self an itinerary, a project of becoming.”

Understand God as such, Gluck’s poems frequently represent a dialogue between the soul (in the religious sense) and the self (in the psychological sense). Her central question, according to Langston, is “how the self can come into being and have intrinsic value. What does it mean to ‘be?’” Averno uses the vocabulary of classical mythology to explore this question, framing it perhaps most clearly in her poems about Persephone, whose fate was dictated wholly by her father (Zeus) and her mother (Demeter).

“The daughter is just meat” in an argument between mother and lover, Gluck lamented in “Persephone the Wanderer.” In that poem, she attempted to explore the psyche of Persephone herself, a character whose agency and consciousness are rarely considered in the myth that bares her name.

Assistant Professor of English Elizabeth Willis, who joined forces with Director of Writing Program Anne Greene to bring Gluck to Wesleyan, has been teaching the poet’s recent collection, “The Seven Ages”, in her course Introduction to Poetry. Students from her class and from Greene’s Distinguished Writers course comprised a large portion of the audience.

Some of the audience commented that Gluck’s poetry Wednesday night had a distinct tone from that of her former work. Elizabeth Langston ’05 is Gluck’s goddaughter, and has known the poet her whole life.“The poem she read from…Averno definitely struck a different chord, a more somber chord than some of her other poetry,” Langston said. “I admire how she can vary her style and tone so dramatically, while retaining a meditative quality in everything she writes. My favorite book of hers is Meadowlands, though, which is a very poignant and hilarious mix of dialogues between a modern married couple and poems about the characters in the Odyssey.”

Willis echoed the sentiment.

“I thought she gave a terrific reading,” she said. “I like the new wor—ut I see it as a development of her earlier work rather than as a departure from it. Her lines have always been very stron—intense, confident, and direct—nd her poetry often engages with classical tropes that are recast, re-understood in terms of a very contemporary emotional engagement. There’s a wonderful balance between the beauty of the language and the sometimes almost prophetic weight of the voice within her poems.”

Gluck, a private person who shuns publicity, left the Chapel abruptly after her reading, precluding the traditional question and answer session, though she remained briefly to sign some books. Gluck said she considers poetry readings a source of revenue—not a source of enjoyment—and especially dislikes halls as large as the Chapel, preferring “cozier” spaces.

“I do not like readings. I intend [my poetry] to be heard in a way I cannot replicate in my voice…it has nothing to do with my narrow human vocal instrument,” she said. “I hear sounds on the page that I cannot make, but I feel that they are on the page. I think that’s why I write poems. But I don’t think that I am the orchestra that can play this music as it was meant to be heard. I think the reader’s brain is where the poems are meant to live.”

Gluck expressed surprise in response to the comments that her new work differs from her earlier poetry.

“I would say that each book is different from its predecessor, sharply different,” she said. “If you read them chronologically or even not in juxtaposition, I think that it’s striking that what I try to do is make each one a distinct and separate world. [As a poet] you try to be continuously adventurous in what you do, and not repeat yourself.”

Her former student Vincent shed some light on the poet as a professor.

“I was a terrible poet, a really bad student for about one year. She was patient with that,” he said. “She’s the origin of both my poetry and my teaching.”

As for Gluck’s reading, Vincent called it “hypnotizing.”

Indeed a strong sense of meter and a careful use of vocal inflection lent a hypnotic effect to the reading. With one foot cocked, dressed all in black, Gluck formed a solemn figure on the podium. Though her reading was generally serious in tone, Gluck frequently elicited laughter from the crowd with some dryly funny segments that exposed a sharp sense of humor. Once, in an attempt to relieve an audience member from some rough-sounding repeated coughs, the poet offered the water from her podium. It was duly refused with much embarrassed laughter by the cougher. This act of kindness was a good representation of the Gluck the person.

“More than a godmother, she is like a second mother figure to me,” Langston said. “We have great conversations and I get to bitch or rave to her about wherever I am in my love life. She’s a very direct person, and very interested in how people interpret and experience changes and transitions in their lives.”

Langston recalled a time when a muse-less Gluck approached her, a child of nine, seeking new ideas for her poetry. Young Elizabeth wrote a poem called “Rose on a Lowly Vine” and gave it to her godmother for inspiration.

“She tells me that that is what inspired her to write The Wild Iris, although I think she is just being nice,” Langston said.

Gluck will be reading in New Haven and North Hampton in the weeks to come.