An Excerpt from Our Interview with Louise Glück

Art of Poetry No. 115

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser Photography of Louise Glück. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. "When you're working on a poem, you're simultaneously immersed in it and detached from it—stepping back from it, regarding it, thinking about its lacks, the places where it's murky without wanting to be," said Louise Glück in her Art of Poetry interview. "There are always two people working on a poem, the writer and the reader." In remembrance of Glück, we are taking the special step of publishing an extended excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview, conducted by Henri Cole, on the Daily. We hope you'll read it, along with her poems in our archive and the reflections on her life and work that we published after her death this fall.  To read the interview in full, subscribe to receive our Winter issue.  INTERVIEW An Excerpt from our Art of Poetry Interview with Louise Glück Louise Glück INTERVIEWER Would you say more about your friends and how they influence your work?  GLÜCK Most of my books are dedicated to my friends. My friends are the center of my life. They are crucial. I change my life to be sure that I see them. They're all quite different people. I would be impoverished without them. Recently, I bought a small house in Vermont, where my oldest friends still are. My dearest friend now lives two minutes away. For a very long time, I lived in Cambridge and showed her everything I wrote though she lived elsewhere, but now another form of the friendship has been resumed, and it seems that it was waiting to be resumed at any time when it could be. My friendships with people in different cities seem to be like that. There can be a distance in time and also a geographical distance, but when I see them again, it's as though no time has passed. I mean, much time has passed, many things have changed, but you resume the conversation about what's going on in the same way as before. And that is the most extraordinary ongoing fact of my life. From issue no. 32 (Summer–Fall 1964) Copyright © 2023 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.