very large fish

A Line in a Dream
Adam Moss: Let’s just start chronologically. How did this poem [“Song”] begin for you?
Louise Glück: I didn’t remember until I looked at those pages I sent you. But then I did recall something about its origins. There’s that piece of paper in the notebook that says, “Leo Cruz has white bowls, I think I must get some to you.” Those lines appeared to me in a dream. I remember waking up and writing them down and thinking, This is a gold mine. Though there’s nothing distinguished about the sentence. The language is very plainspoken. And of course it was altered in the final version. But I had a sense when I woke up that day that I had something on the line—some very large fish was toying with me under the water.

From “Waiting,” an interview with Louise Glück in The Work of Art: How something comes from nothing (Penguin Press, 2024) by Adam Moss

original gift

...I think some intensity of awareness must be lost, since it depends on contrast. And that intensity is impoverishment's aftermath, and blessing: what succeeds temporary darkness, what succeeds the void or the desert, is not the primary gift of the world but the essential secondary gift of knowledge, a sense of the significance of the original gift, the scale of our privilege.

—Louise Glück, “On Impoverishment,” Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994)

write differently

The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing in not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently.

—Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco, 1994, p. 3)