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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted.
I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.
There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. 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.