Edward Hirsch Quotes & Sayings

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. — Edward Hirsch

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

'Liberty Brass' is a small machine that unfolds in a single unpunctuated wave, which is interrupted by the rotating sign, the refrain. Each part is meant to do its work in relentless progression. — Edward Hirsch

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

The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps. — Edward Hirsch

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

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. — Edward Hirsch

The same soul never steps into the river twice. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone. — Edward Hirsch

Grief broke down in phrases
And extrapolated lines
From me without myself
Tear-stained pillow of stone
I felt I was lying
Beside him in the coffin
Wormy mother
Who takes us into the ground
With her whenever and wherever
She wants the grass glistens
And grows over us in the heat
Of late summer in the country — Edward Hirsch

He tried to escape he could not
Cut the binding cord of human love [ ... ]
Sweet venom
His arrivals were swift
And his departures sudden
I couldn't understand how
He lifted the shower door
Right off its hinges [ ... ]
Love you he coughed and kissed me
See you next week he was out
The door like a thousand other times [ ... ]
Most reckless of
reckless angels — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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

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

A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective. — Edward Hirsch

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

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 Hirsch

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. — Edward Hirsch

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

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. — Edward Hirsch

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations. — Edward Hirsch

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. 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. — Edward Hirsch

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

Like a spear hurtling through darkness
He was always in such a hurry
To find a target to stop him
Like a young lion trying out its roar
At the far edge of the den
The roar inside him was even louder — Edward Hirsch

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

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. — Edward Hirsch

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself. — Edward Hirsch

I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night
The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief
I did not know I would struggle
Through a ragged underbrush
Without an upward path
...
Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders
That's why it takes courage
To get out of bed in the morning
And climb into the day. — Edward Hirsch

We can only understand what we can name. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

To Poetry"

Don't desert me
just because I stayed up last night
watching The Lost Weekend.

I know I've spent too much time
praising your naked body to strangers
and gossiping about lovers you betrayed.

I've stalked you in foreign cities
and followed your far-flung movements,
pretending I could describe you.

Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee
and obsessing over your features
year after jittery year.

I'm sorry for handing you a line
and typing you on a screen,
but don't let me suffer in silence.

Does anyone still invoke the Muse,
string a wooden lyre for Apollo,
or try to saddle up Pegasus?

Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess,
indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic,
pleasance and half wonder, hell,

I have loved you my entire life
without even knowing what you are
or how - please help me - to find you. — Edward Hirsch

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

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can. — Edward Hirsch

I read a lot as a kid and in high school. — Edward Hirsch

We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if 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. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. — Edward Hirsch

We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else. — Edward Hirsch

Think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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

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. — Edward Hirsch

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 inhere in poems alone. — Edward Hirsch

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

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. — Edward Hirsch

When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. — Edward Hirsch

As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It's not all inherit in the poem. — Edward Hirsch

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

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 — Edward Hirsch

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

I keep scraping the canvas
And painting him over again
But he keeps slipping away — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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 — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch

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." — Edward Hirsch

I think it shapes it in very deep ways that you don't entirely understand. Rainer Maria Rilke said there are two inexhaustible sources for poetry. One is dreams, and the other is childhood. I think childhood is an inexhaustible source of your becoming who you will be and certain deep feelings are set inside of you. — Edward Hirsch

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind. — Edward Hirsch

I am a tiny seashell
that has secretly drifted ashore
and carries the sound of the ocean
surging through its body. — Edward Hirsch

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. — Edward Hirsch