She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. .Millard Kaufman
About This Quote
In the book "Tender Fictions," by Michael Cunningham, there is a passage from a letter written by James Merrill, who was the author of The Book of Night Women. In this passage, Merrill describes his wife, Marilynne Robinson. In the middle of a sentence, he breaks off and starts describing how she did her work. He then goes on to describe how he fell in love with her work.
He was surprised at how much he loved her poetry and how it made him feel during reading it. He went on to say that he has been married to her for over 50 years and yet he never knew her poems before.
Source: Bowl Of Cherries
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