Grace Cavalieri: Well, the reason I asked about your process is because the vowels are so musical. That is either from years of hard work, or something that actually could not have been constructed. The vowels in that poem are extraordinary, and it is the motion in the poem. Of course I’m on the other side of the table; I have the opportunity to listen. And I was just thinking how one gets into such a space of comfort, to use vowels that way, and that’s a very musical poem. Also, it has, one of your characteristics, the direct address in the middle, which jettisons where you have been. And as I always say, you’re very mischievous, you lull us along in the poem and then you do something quite unusual. The last lines, with your adverbs, are unusual for you too—”softly,” “fiercely”—now that’s interesting. I see they’re in parentheses. I heard them in parentheses.

Louise Glück: That interests me.

GC: I have often said you do something no other poet does as well, and it’s not fair to leave you there. You can take the emotion, the very fragile feeling, and you build a scenario around it. You build a house around the feeling. Now that sounds like something everyone does, but no one does it exactly as you do. It is misunderstood as autobiography sometime, but it is fiction, except for the feelings. Where did you get your confidence in story?

LG: Well, that’s a quite curious question.

I adore the fact that these two questions alone are nearly complete paragraphs, and that Louise Glück manages to answer them both with a single, noncommittal sentence.

Just in case you’re suspicious, I did absolutely no editing. Go ahead: check.