On Writing: Louise Gluck

Something can be marvelous and still need to be stopped. Otherwise you don't change. It's as simple as that. And if you don't change, then you stop writing good poems. Really, I believe that. So when you can identify something as a maneuver, however successful, even if you never do it badly, you should stop doing it.

If I have any message to any of you who write, it's that you cannot sit calmly repeating yourself. And the hard thing about that is, oftentimes when you change, the new poems, the adventurous poems, may be less successful than the evolved poems of another mode. So you have to be willing to set aside that degree of finish, that degree of polish, for something that might seem to you more primitive.