Edward Hirsch Quotes

In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.

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.

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.

In the Middle Ages, the troubadour poets invented the concept of courtly love--a fantasy love, a noble passion, which was also extra-marital and thus inevitably thwarted, illicit, adulterous. One of the medieval terms for it was amour honestus (honest love). I've always wondered why this passionate ideal--masochistic, spiritual-travelled with such wildfire throughout Europe. My poem, a ghazal, takes up the subject.

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

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

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

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.

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.

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.

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."

And my experience is the best titles, for me, emerge in the process of writing. They don't usually come at the very beginning and hopefully they don't come at the very end because then it's getting late in the day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

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

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.

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.

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.

So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.

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.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.

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."

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

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.

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

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.