Proofs & Theories Quotes

“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“I'm attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied. . .”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“Despair in our culture tends to produce wild activity: change the job, change the partner, replace the faltering ambition instantly. We fear passivity and prize action, meaning the action we initiate. But the self cannot be willed back. And flight from despair forfeits whatever benefit may arise in the encounter with despair.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place / And what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Her death was not my experience, but her absence was.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“To live in the present must mean being unerringly decisive, but choice, there, is easier, not harder. I do not claim to live on this plane, but I can imagine it.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Night Song” suggests that the oblivion we ultimately achieve is an outpost of solitude from which the other is exiled—your oblivion is not mine, as your dream is not. This last line makes a mockery of placation; it damns the wish it grants. Against the relentless pronoun, the verbs are drumbeats, infantile, primitive. If what we want is oblivion, we are all lucky.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Love connects one irreplaceable being to another: the payment is terror of death, since if each person is unique, each death is singular, an eternal isolation.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“In my generation, most of the poets I admire are interested in length they want to write long lines, long stanzas, long poems, poems which cover an extended sequence of events. To all this I feel an instant objection, whose sources I'm not confident I know.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment- the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It's like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims toward it, it backs away.
That's my sense of the poem's beginning. What follows is a period of more concentrated work, so called because as long as one is working the thing itself is wrong or unfinished: a failure. Still, this engagement is absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known. And then the poem is finished, and at the moment, instantly detached: it becomes what it was first perceived to be, a thing always in existence. No record exists of the poet's agency. And the poet, from that point, isn't a poet anymore, simple someone who wishes to be one.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“Between poems, I am not a poet, only someone with a yearning to achieve—what? That concentration again.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“The power to redeem and the power to destroy, whether real or projected, always coexist.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Some work is done through suffering, through impoverishment, through the involuntary relinquishing of a self.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“The terror of this condition is that it has lost the power to yearn, while remembering a time when this was not so. It yearns only for respite, meaning release from hopelessness; it can imagine no more specific objective. Moreover, such confinement represents itself not as a tunnel, a darkness being passed through, but as a well; it is a place time cannot reach. Because response to the world is no longer actively felt, change--which is inherently active--seems impossible to imagine. This profound sense of having nothing, of being incapable of thought or response, this desolate emptiness runs contrary to every hope we have for ourselves; its atmosphere of finality reproduces the sensation of arrival that characterizes triumph, and mocks that sensation. At the same time, interior paralysis magnifies external vitality: all around, other people seem enviably caught up in, animated by feeling.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“it seemed clear to me that if my talent was so fragile, so precarious, as to require insulation from the world, it would never produce what I dreamed of anyway.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Among the residual gifts of love is a composure, an openness to all experience, so profound it amounts to an acceptance of death. Or, more accurately, the future is no longer necessary. One is not rash, neither is one paralyzed by conservatism or hope. Simply, the sense of having lived, of having known one’s fate, is very strong. And that sensation tells us what it is to live without the restrictions of fear. Such moments, in a way, have nothing to teach; they can be neither contrived nor prolonged by will. What they establish is a standard. Not forever, but for once it was possible to refuse consolation, to refuse the blindfold.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Poetic intelligence lacks, I think, such focused investment in conclusion, being naturally wary of its own assumptions. It derives its energy from a willingness to discard conclusion in the face of evidence, its willingness, in fact, to discard anything.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“the poem, no matter how charged its content, will not survive on content but through voice.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Jeffers writes out of enraged, disappointed romanticism: civilized in his expectations, he cannot forgive civilization in that it wasn’t worth his faith.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“It seems to me what that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysterious. The problem is to make a whole that does not foreit this power.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“great innocence sounds in the lines, a kind of eager gratitude that passionate dedication should have been rewarded with fluency.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“And the only means of conversion is dogged imitation, which is always deficient and never works and can go on indefinitely, because we so need to fend off the implicit judgment. And we work always facing the monument, so as to re-create it perfectly. But the monument remains the monument. Or the obstacle. And the poems we write in this state are the dead products of fear and inhibition; they have no author at all.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“If I describe my own sensation, I would say these poems confirmed an existing hope; they fostered the sense that I had it in me to write. In fact, that was the exact experience: I had, in the act of reading, had it in me.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“What the speaker wants is presence, not union, dissolution, but the condition which preceded it. The choice is not between dreaming and lovemaking (another escape of self) but between dreaming and watching. Simultaneous consciousness, in other words—the exultant recognition of one soul by another.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“Finally, I prefer teaching as a means to encounter the not fully realized, the sporadically wonderful. That context transforms the unrealized to the incipient.”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner

“The world is complete without us. Intolerable fact. To which the poet responds by rebelling, wanting to prove otherwise. Out of wounded vanity or stubborn pride or desolate need, the poet lives in chronic dispute with fact, and an astonishment occurs: another fact is created, like a new element, in partial contradiction of the intolerable. Indelible voice, though it has no impact on the non-human universe,”
― Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry – Rigorous Literary Criticism on Poetics and Writing from a Nobel Prize Winner