Louise Glück was reticent, careful about what she said. She could be distant. There was always a sense that her real life was lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her time alone. With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.
In her own poems, she worked with silence, breaking it, creating more space for it, leaving gaps, writing lines that would hold as much implication as they could.
