She insisted on calling herself a writer. It was for posterity to judge if she was a “poet,” she averred in an essay. News of her passing hit me with a jolt on the very day of it. Louise Glück died on October 13, 2023, aged 80.

Her astutely acid critiques of my submissions in a writing seminar she conducted at Greensboro administered a salutary coup de grâce to my juvenile ambitions to write poetry. At seminar’s end I set sail to fail in other directions, and have since paid her the readerly devotion the genre exacts from me. An unsentimental, Olympian reserve I treasure in Glück’s work has provided a benchmark for how I prospect for poems in verse I consume.

Here’s another comment from Colm Tóibín’s tribute in The Guardian:

Glück was not afraid of using words like “soul” or “god”, or making use of primal images of forest and light and dark and sun and moon. But the poems were not abstract. They were poems of hard experience. She didn’t do innocence. The poems were filled with emotions that she knew only too well.

(Colm Tóibín, “Louise Glück: a poet who never shied away from silence, pain or fear,” theguardian.com, 10-17-12)

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