NBA winner Louise Gluck talks about talent vs. hunger

Louise Gluck, Yale Daily News

In a late 2013 interview with the Yale Herald, poet Louise Gluck, who last week won the National Book Award for her latest collection, "Faithful and Virtuous Night," talks about talent vs. hunger.

YH: What is the extent to which you believe the writing of verse can really be taught?

LG: It’s impossible to know. Intelligence can be stimulated. Likewise a taste for the process. Usually the person who is going to develop into a writer is a sensitive reader and a good critic. When people are good critics, anything can happen. That means there is a deep alertness to syntax, to language. You work on individual poems, poem by poem and poem; you try to point out where the phrasing and structure are, in your view, alive. I think the question of who’s going to be a writer has more to do with intelligence and hunger than anything you would say was talent. There’s a ton of talent, first of all, and it takes you only so far. People with toughness and willingness to start over, combined with really remarkable minds and intense need, those are the people who can become anything.

http://yaleherald.com/voices/sitting-down-with-louise-gluck/