In 2008, I was lucky enough to be one of Louise Gluck’s poetry students at Boston University’s MFA program.
I remember taking the T to her Cambridge apartment, the breakable vases of dried flowers from her garden everywhere, all of us crowded on the couch and floor hoping not to be the one dumb enough to bump something over.
We were all (I think–or at least I was) a little afraid of her, this tiny steel-gray haired woman, so cutting and dry with her poetry and her remarks (but always a bit of sly humor there).
She had pink Himalayan sea-salt on the table–I hailed from Tennessee backwoods and I’d never seen that before. She used a typewriter in a windowed room. I thought she was the most elegant person I’d ever met.
I remember her telling me the end of one of my poems was “Flaccid”–I knew it was bad from my classmates’ giggles (yes, giggles), but had to look up what it meant when I got back to the dilapidated broken-window Victorian apartment my husband and I (21 years old, newlyweds) were renting. Flaccid, added to the vocabulary. And I sure as hell fixed that ending.
I remember her telling me a very complicated writing exercise: write from a memory (“of which you have so many,” she said), include a staircase, seven people, an insect, and darkness. I wrote and sweated and swore over that poem, and turned it in. She told me she didn’t remember giving me that exercise, but she liked the poem.
Toward the end of my time at BU, I remember meeting with her for one-on-one conference at her home, over my final manuscript, and her telling me that she really thought that I had talent. I could’ve about fallen out on the floor to hear her say that, and that encouragement bolstered me up through many a year in my mediocre poetry-career.
Because one thing about Louise: she meant what she said.
She could be just as biting and austere as her poetry, but what was so attractive about her and her writing was the truth, the plain bald-faced truth, told in both of them.
Thank you, Louise, for being my teacher and for your beautiful poetry.
Renee Emerson 
thoughts?