The Poet Who Taught Me to Write Books

The first book of poetry I ever read was Ararat (1990), by Louise Glück. I had read many poems in classes, from anthologies, but had never actually read a collection of poems front to back, or even thought about a collection as a meaningful record of a poet’s creative output at a given time. At the time—this was 1994—I was an eighteen-year-old sophomore at Yale, enrolled in my first poetry workshop. Our professor, the poet Wayne Koestenbaum, had given us the task of reading a book of contemporary poetry and writing a brief report.