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."
Edward HirschThe 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.
Edward HirschBut, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.
Edward HirschThere's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.
Edward HirschGertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward HirschAnd 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.
Edward Hirsch