Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirschis an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker calls “a masterpiece of sorrow.” He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 January 1950
CountryUnited States of America
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.
You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.
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.
I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.
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.
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.
You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.
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.
Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.
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.
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.
Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.