Edward Hirsch Quotes

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader and that meaning doesn't exist or in here in poems alone.

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I've gotten it, it's pretty much completed.

But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss.

Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency

I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midlife experience, there's the late poetry in the presence of death.

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.

Now, I do say, "It's possible. You might be the first. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the odds are very much against you." All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.

I would say there are different kinds of poems. There are things that poets in the history of poetry hit upon when they're very young that can never be outdone and it's a remarkable, strange experience when you think of say Arthur Rimbaud who write poetry between the ages of 17 and 21 whose career was over by the time he was 22.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.

I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in which a young poet goes through the program, publishes a series of books, gets teaching jobs, that's a bit at risk.

Readers bring their own experiences, their own range of - their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poem and the meaning of a poem takes place in the negotiation between the poet, the poem and the reader.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

And it was the title August 13th for most of the way and then near the end, sometime in the process, I got the idea that maybe that would be a somewhat bland title and I got the idea for wild gratitude, which I'm very proud of as a title. So, I think it works best when you find it in the process.

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.

I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

I mean, when I was young I could write all through the night and I loved to work late into the night. Now that I'm older I work really well in the early morning when your synapses are firing a little better. But I work at different times of the day.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.

And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."

It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.