"Rereading this poem, written years ago now, I'm reminded of how much I miss cities. Houston, where I'd leave my window open to hear the sound of the night trains. Los Angeles, where I once drove by a church as two people pretended to be married in the fake rain of a film set. San Francisco, where I wrote this poem and so many of the ones in "Suitor." And like so many poems from that time, it is infused with images of city life: buses and hotels and store windows. I think of the brick hospital across the street from my first apartment and the moment that started the poem, watching a man in a crosswalk, holding up traffic while he shakes a beat-up guitar at a bus. To curse. To praise. To offer."
The chair of the Nobel prize committee, Anders Olsson, noted, "In her poems, the self listens for what is left of its dreams and delusions, and nobody can be harder than she in confronting the illusions of the self....But even if Glück would never deny the significance of the autobiographical background, she is not to be regarded as a confessional poet."
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“I remember telling my students give me a minute I have to write something down, and though I say 'the words just came' the language itself felt almost intrusive, like a clumsy adaptation of a finer, more efficient form of communication—and yet, the pressure to inscribe was compelling. It was like passively receiving something and also being able to physically make something at the same time."
