Louise Glück (1943–2023) was born in New York City and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. Her collection The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993, and Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) won the National Book Award. Other collections include Ararat (1990), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), and Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). She was writer in residence at Yale University and a senior lecturer at Stanford. Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the 2001 Bollingen Prize.
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
I was dating a poet. ("Dating" is a strong word; I was trying to date a poet but he was in love with someone else and used my bed as an occasional place to crash.) He read "Early Darkness" by Louise Glück to me and I was hooked. I was immediately obsessed with the depth and power of this poem, of a god looking at creation and asking, "How can you say / earth should give me joy?"