Edward Hirsch Quotes

Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.

That you write a phrase or you think of something and it seems to have a deeper charge because the title has to be some kind of marker, something setting out a space, creating a space for what's going to come.

There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.

A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather/from the air like a cherished possession.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

It's not important - it's not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.

You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.

That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.

Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

I don't have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry.

I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.

I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.

The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.