A Post! A Post! My blogdom for a post!

Lunch yesterday with Louise Gluck ruled for the following reasons:

1. Vegan food was scarce, so I was only eating fruit. Gluck was also only eating fruit, which means we had some small thing in common.

2. We talked about her recent poem in the New Yorker and how willing folks were to (mis)read autobiography into it ("I didn't know your father drank!") as well as to approach it as a short story.

3. Gluck spoke of the value reading prose, especially fiction in manuscript form, has had for her in helping to structure a book of poems. She also mentioned the merit of murder mysteries, or any other guilty pleasure, in giving the conscious mind a rest and allowing the subconscious to replenish itself.

4. Allowing for differences in process, she didn't put much stock into a nun-like renouncing of distractions in favor of rigid writing schedules. Gluck said she's found it impossible to force herself to write, and has gotten used to long periods of silence followed by periods of intense productivity. This is what she believes has made it possible for each of her books to have unique aims instead of working in the same vein as the last.

5. Finally, as Amanda commented on earlier, Gluck spoke of alternating between horizontal and vertical tonal shapes in her books, finding her newest project (_The Village Life_, coming this fall) to be more landscape-oriented and to call for a flatter language.