I studied with Louise Glück for three years in college: two workshops and an independent study. She was THEE dominant influence on my poetry (my mind?) for years. The unwavering intensity, the deep feeling for the drama of life and equally deep, often ironic, resistance to drama.

Her feedback was SO detailed and often cutting: this is the first poem I turned in, freshman year: “Sounds like diluted Hass: fine to use him, but all traces must be erased.”

Or this, which haunts me still: “you’re writing too entirely out of the rapt incantatory: fine as a generative mode, but unless you push harder with other kinds of intelligence you’re left with blather—a grand, fatuous music.”

She went on: “Make no mistake: this is a crucial gift. Nor would I ever suggest you rid a poem of this strangeness. But you have to see where it wobbles and blanks out. Potentially very strong.”

She respected my work enough to invite me to do an indepdent study. The twist is: three years out of undergrad she *claimed not to remember our independent study* and *refused to write me a letter of recommendation*—a dysphoric phone call tbh. I didn’t do a poetry MFA.

The next twist is: I ran into her at a wedding some years after that, where she apologized warmly and profusely for her behavior, without explaining it at all. She invited me to send new work (which I never did). I always found her as difficult and compelling irl as on the page.

So basically Louise Glück is why I’m a poet and also why I’m not one! When she cast me aside I wanted to quote her poem “Vita Nova” to her face:

You saved me, you should remember me.

We’re both Tauruses, but maybe the difference is that I remain enchanted (she would say deluded) by Venusian softness. Either way we share a ruling planet.