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I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.

Edward Hirsch

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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Away
Live
Knelt
Need
Blasted
Needs
Crooked
Like
Winds
Hardest
Wind
Tree

More quotes by Edward Hirsch

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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.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
Edward Hirsch
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That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.
Edward Hirsch
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There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
Edward Hirsch
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A hook shot kisses the rim and hangs there, helplessly, but doesn't drop and for once our gangly starting center boxes out his man and times his jump perfectly, gathering the orange leather/from the air like a cherished possession.
Edward Hirsch
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I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.
Edward Hirsch
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Gertrude Stein said, I write for myself and strangers. I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward Hirsch
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There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.
Edward Hirsch
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Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.
Edward Hirsch