The Threepenny Review’s Fall 2013 issue includes a section called “A Symposium on Revenge” with selections by Geoff Dyer, Robert Pinsky, James Lasdun, Adam Phillips, and Louise Glück. Threepenny, so lovingly, made Glück’s essay available online:
My idea of revenge was to prove that I had not been hurt, or had somehow exacted hurt, which (as my fantasies repeatedly demonstrated) I had miraculously transformed into something intensely to be envied. My dream was to create envy: my idea of revenge depended on the object’s remaining conscious and fully aware.
Mainly, I thought about the poems I would write. In my imagination, these poems would be of a greatness that compelled, in throngs of readers, a uniform amazement, the only disagreements arising out of attempts to describe this greatness or account for it. At some point, I became aware that such response had never, in the history of literature, occurred.
I, for one, would write significantly less if no one ever pissed me off.
The entire symposium is available if you purchase Threepenny’s current issue, but you can read the rest of Glück’s essay now.
