Jean Bowen

“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

“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

“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

“I read quickly, flitting and sipping, skipping the boring bits and seizing on the oddities and inconsistencies which are often ignored by the scholars since they interfere with the measured and coherent approach to the matter at hand.”
― Alice Thomas Ellis, Fish, Flesh And Good Red Herring