Louise Glück: Sometimes there’ll be lines in my head for two years before I know how to use them. I don’t know in what context what I hear can be liberated. So initially, they seem a great gift, because you have these two beautiful lines. And then they become a torment, because you have these two beautiful lines that aren’t in themselves a poem, and you have no idea what kind of house to build for them, around them. There have been periods in my life when my first thought in the morning has been that piece of language, my last thought at night the piece of language. But it’s like a whip. It’s a punishment, because I can’t do it. And then in each of those cases, ultimately I could write a poem that made a world. And every so often — after I was 50 I started writing books very rapidly. This happened in maybe four or five books. The Wild Iris was written — except for about five poems — it was written in six weeks, eight weeks. Vita Nova the same. The Seven Ages was written in something like six weeks. Just like four or five poems a day. And then the day before you start you’re a complete blank, and then all of a sudden six weeks later you have a book. And then you’re very tired and you get sick. And then some of the other — Village Life was different. Averno was written in two halves, the first kind of slow, dogged, hopeless. Then a hiatus of about two years, and then two years later the second half. Very fast. And then Village Life was sort of ideal. It was a steady writing for about a year, and a sense of great curiosity and contentment and richness, without any of the tempestuousness of that very rapid, “you give up sleep” thing. I know — I know it sounds like something that should be medicated, but it doesn’t feel like mania to me. It’s very specific to this one event. Anyway, it’s certainly not going on now.