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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.
Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
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.