Wit & Attitude Quote by Phyllis Gotlieb

Poetry arrives here less like a prize you hunt than a weather system you learn to read. Phyllis Gotlieb’s line yanks the romance out of inspiration while keeping its mystery intact: you “take what comes,” which sounds passive until she snaps the leash with that blunt punchline about labor. It’s a credo built on a productive contradiction. She grants the old myth of the muse - “Maybe the gods do it through me” - then immediately undercuts it with a salty insistence on craft: whatever divine spark exists, it still needs a human engine to turn it into art.

The intent is practical, almost managerial: stop fetishizing the perfect state of inspiration and start showing up. The subtext is also quietly feminist in its refusal to let genius be framed as supernatural possession, a narrative that historically flatters “chosen” (often male) artists while dismissing the daily discipline that sustains a working writer’s life. Gotlieb keeps the door open for awe without letting it become an alibi.

Context matters: a novelist speaking about poetry blurs genre boundaries and suggests a broader theory of making. Writing isn’t a heroic quest; it’s receptivity plus stamina. The profanity - “a hell of a lot” - is doing rhetorical work, puncturing sanctimony and asserting authority from the workbench, not the altar. It’s the kind of line that demystifies art without diminishing it: the gods may whisper, but the writer hauls the bricks.