Louise Gluck
Louise Gluck
Louise Elisabeth Glückis an American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 April 1943
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
vocabulary silence wish
I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen...
appetite cultural laureate seems
We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding.
artist defensive erase future knowledge toward
Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.
I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations.
best full means poem range seemed subtleties suited surprising
What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.
good seems
It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.
self mind answers
17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other. 18. The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.
wall taken thinking
So you couldn't protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you're free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you're free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
mother giving-up father
Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as the image of my father, whose life was spent like this, thinking of death, to the exclusion of other sensual matters, so in the end that life was easy to give up, since it contained nothing: even my mother's voice couldn't make him change or turn back as he believed that once you can't love another human being you have no place in the world.
dream soul speak
The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.
form
The love of form is a love of endings.
loss birth hard
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
doors suffering ends
At the end of my suffering/there was a door.
winter should-have despair
You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.