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.

“No, well one of the things that’s very curious is that I seem to have two methods of writing. One is the craftsperson method, which now seems, because I haven’t done it a while, very dear to me, in which the words are labored over; and a sense of agency is created by that process. You actually have a sense of yourself as making the poem. When you write very rapidly, when I write very rapidly, I lose that sense that the poem is mine. I can’t think where it came from. But it’s usually done quite quickly, and altered very little…. [There are some poems] that were over and over and over revised; taken apart, put together again, but in a very compressed period of time. And then there are poems in which there are recalcitrant words, phrases, things that I feel could be better…. 

I think that it’s—in saying to write, you’re going to write that which most concerns you, which most quickens your mind, and then to turn those subjects over with as resourceful and complex a touch as possible. I am endlessly irritated by the reading of my poems as autobiography. I draw on the materials my life has given me, but what interests me isn’t that they happen to me, what interests me is that they seem, as I look around, paradigmatic. We’re all born mortal. We have to contend with the idea of mortality. We all, at some point, love, with the risks involved, the vulnerabilities involved, the disappointments and great thrills of passion. This is common human experience, so what you use is the self as a laboratory, in which to practice, master, what seem to you central human dilemmas.”

–Louise Glück, in an interview with Grace Cavalieri for the radio series “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” during the Library’s bicentennial celebration in 2000. 

For more: “In the Magnificent Region of Courage: An Interview with Louise Glück”