Louise Glück, The Art of Poetry
The Paris Review Subscribe Louise Glück , The Art of Poetry No. 115 Interviewed by Henri Cole Issue 246, Winter 2023 Tucson, Arizona, 1978. photograph by Lois Shelton, © Arizona Board of Regents, courtesy of the University of Arizona Poetry Center. In early March of 2021, Louise Glück visited Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, where I teach. Because of COVID , she was afraid to fly on a small plane to our regional airport, so I drove her myself from Berkeley, where, for some years, she rented a house during the winters. She packed pumpernickel bagels, apples, and cheese for our six-hour road trip, and she brought CDs of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto , Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera , and the songs of Jacques Brel, a Belgian master of the modern chanson. Long ago Glück and her former husband had listened to operas on road trips, but this was her first car trip in many years. She knew the musical works backward and forward, pointing ...