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
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.
There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.
I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.
And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.
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.
A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.
In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."
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.
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.
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.
You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.
Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
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.
Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.