Edward Hirsch Quotes

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.

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.

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.

The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.

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.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.

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.

There is so much Everything that Nothing is hidden quite nicely. Eventually,

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, Wild Gratitude, and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title August 13th.

I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.

I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.

Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.

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.

Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.

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

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.

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

I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.

I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.

Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.

Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare.

The population of his feelings
Could not be governed
By the authorities

He had reasons why
Reason disobeyed him
And voted him out of office

Anxiety
His constant companion
Made it difficult to rest

Unruly party of one
Forget about truces or compromises
The barricades will be stormed

Every day was an emergency
Every day called for another emergency
Meeting of the cabinet

In his country
There were scenes
Of spectacular carnage

Hurricanes welcomed him
He adored typhoons and tornadoes
Furies unleashed

Houses lifted up
And carried to the sea
Uncontained uncontainable

Unbolt the doors
Fling open the gates
Here he comes

Chaotic wind of the gods
He was trouble
But he was our trouble

There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.

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.

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.

I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.

And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.

If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, 'You're out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?' But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.

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.

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

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

Our sense that things are transient, that everything is passing and then if you want to save something from the endless flux of experience and the world's movement, you have to set down a stake and try and make something that will last.

I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off.

James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly.

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder.

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.

We can only understand what we can name.

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.

Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

The evening with its lamps burning
The night with its head in its hands
The early morning

I look back at the worried parents
Wandering through the house
What are we going to do

The evening of the clinical
The night of the psychological
The morning facedown in the pillow

The experts can handle him
The experts have no idea
How to handle him

There are enigmas in darkness
There are mysteries
Sent out without searchlights

The stars are hiding tonight
The moon is cold and stony
Behind the clouds

Nights without seeing
Mornings of the long view
It's not a sprint but a marathon

Whatever we can do
We must do
Every morning's resolve

But sometimes we suspected
He was being punished
For something obscure we had done

I would never abandon the puzzle
Sleeping in the next room
But I could not solve it

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

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.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.

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.

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language.

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.

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.

After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather's death and I thought my grandfather had written it.

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.

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 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.

Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. Probably

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.

Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel.

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.

There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.

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."

So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly quickly whereas some of the clearest, simplest lyrics that I've written have taken me the longest to get to the clarity of feeling that you're looking for.

Life has to have the plenitude of art.

Sometimes I have a feeling that I just can't get rid of. Sometimes there's an experience that I want to write about that I have to get off my chest. Sometimes there are some words that appeal to you.

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me.

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

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

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.

What else are there but rituals
To cover up the emptiness
O Disbelief

Lord Nothingness
When my son's suffering ended
My own began

Why did the sun rise this morning
It's not natural
I don't want to see the light

It's not time to close the casket
Or say Kaddish for my son
I've already buried two fathers

With a mother to come
Isn't that enough Lord who wants us
To exalt and sanctify Him

I don't want to wear the mourner's ribbon
Or wake up crying every morning
For God knows how long

I don't want to tuck my son into the ground
As if we were putting him to bed
For the last time

And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

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.

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.

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.

I wish I could believe in the otherworld I wish I could believe in a place Of reunions outside of memory

As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you.

Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.

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 elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry.

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss ...

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 think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

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.

Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.

Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.

I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.

Despite catastrophes that defy the imagination, daily life goes on, forgetfulness seems to conquer memory, the world keeps mysteriously renewing itself.

Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.

As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn.

Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything
For his art he dedicated himself
To the Great Work

I admired his single-mindedness
All through my twenties
I argued his case

Now I think he was a jerk
For skipping his daughter's wedding
For fear of losing his focus

He believed in the ancient enmity
Between daily life and the highest work
Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies

It is probably a middle-class prejudice
Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova
Should have raised her son Lev

Instead of dumping him on her husband's mom
Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed
I was not worthy of it

Lev never considered it sufficient
For her to stand outside his prison
Month after month clutching packages

And composing Requiem for the masses