Photo Credit: Xavi Permanyer
Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and editor. With Bruce Boone, he founded the New Narrative movement in San Francisco. His poetry collections include Reader and, with Boone, La Fontaine. His fiction includes the story collection Denny Smith, and the novel Jack the Modernist. Glück edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and his collected essays, Communal Nude, appeared in 2016. Glück served as the director of San Francisco State’s Poetry Center, co-director of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. He lives in San Francisco.
City Lights, New York Review Books and Small Press Traffic will celebrate the publication of Robert Glück’s new book About Ed, published by New York Review Books, in an event at The Lab (2948 16th Street, San Francisco) on Friday, November 17, 2023 at 7:00pm PT. Register here!
Where are you writing to us from?
From my bed, where I often work, in my house on Clipper St. in San Francisco. Here is a description of it from About Ed:
“I own many things that Ed and I bought together or made when we were a couple. I sleep in the cedar bed we built in 1975 when we moved to Clipper Street. Our sperm hit the headboard, a plain of roiling grain….I’ve slept in our bed for forty-seven years; it will be my deathbed if I’m lucky. Late-medieval meets Danish modern, my taste for grandeur curtailed by our lack of power tools. You climb into it: the mattress rides almost three feet above the floor. I wanted to give it a roof like the bed in Bosch’s Death and the Miser. Ed vetoed that, but we made a headboard so high that on either side an angel and a devil already haggle over the mourant’s soul.”
What is bringing you joy right now, personally/artistically/habitually?
This is a nightmare moment politically—I’m sure everyone agrees. But one thing I watch with excitement is the growing willingness to organize and strike. San Francisco teachers have just authorized a strike. Labor must get strong to start chipping away at our ludicrous income disparity—it’s at the heart of many current problems.
Other things that bring me joy: Kampot peppercorns, Early Girl tomatoes, summer melons, the performance artist Edgar Oliver, Frits Henningsen (Danish designer), Gertrude Vasegaard (ceramics), and working with clay.
There’s a café on 18th with the best French pastry and—well—whatever it is that makes a great café, Le Marais.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
In general: Frank O’Hara, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Bruce Boone, and the overheated Bay Area poetry community, which is my home.
This book: The Gospel of Thomas, the 15th-century morality play Everyman, Philippe Ariès’ The Hour of Our Death, Rolland Barthes’ Mourning Diary.
What books are you reading right now and would you recommend any to others?
I recently read Ida Marie Hede’s Adorable—a fantastic book that tackles life in amazing prose: childbirth, care giving, love, death.
I am just finishing Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion. Now I know why she won a Nobel Prize, and I am also surprised she won it because the book is so frank.
I read Evan Kennedy’s Metamorphoses with rich pleasure, and Mike Lippens’s My Dead Book from Pilot Press—wonderful prose, close to the edge of the cliff.
And I am looking at one of the cookbooks by the great San Francisco poet Ronald Johnson, The American Table, with curiosity and affection. He is very present in it.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
Well now, I did have a bookstore in the seventies and eighties. It was Small Press Traffic, just a few blocks away on 24th St. Since that was one of the happiest chapters of my life, let me revive it. My bestseller: Camille Roy’s Honey Mine.
