Literary Birthday – 22 April – Louise Glück

Louise Glück was born 22 April 1943 and died 13 October 2023.

‘The master said
You must write what you see.
But what I see does not move me.
The master answered
Change what you see.’
~Louise Glück, Vita Nova

Louise Glück Quotes

1. It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing… Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable… It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.
2. Usually the person who is going to develop into a writer is a sensitive reader and a good critic. When people are good critics, anything can happen. That means there is a deep alertness to syntax, to language.
3. I think the question of who’s going to be a writer has more to do with intelligence and hunger than anything you would say was talent. There’s a ton of talent, first of all, and it takes you only so far. People with toughness and willingness to start over, combined with really remarkable minds and intense need, those are the people who can become anything.
4. I feel quite passionately that the degree to which I have, if I have, stayed alive as a writer and changed as a writer, owes much to the intensity with which I’ve immersed myself in the work, sometimes very alien work, of people younger than I, people making sounds I haven’t heard.
5. I took my first teaching job, and the minute I started to teach I started to write. I’ve always connected teaching and writing.
6. Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
7. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

Louise Glück was an American poet. She was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. She was the author of 12 books of poems and a collection of essays. Her many other awards included the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003. Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems won the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.

Source for Image: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louise_Gl%C3%BCck_circa_1977.jpg