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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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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Young
Demand
Cafeteria
People
Students
Resulted
Generations
Commonly
Style
Combined
Information
Shared
Education
Steady
Place
Demands
Diminishment
School
Schools
Unwillingness

More quotes by Edward Hirsch

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Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
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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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.
Edward Hirsch
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I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.
Edward Hirsch
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Sometimes the title comes to you at the beginning, sometimes it comes at the end. The very best way in my experience is when it comes in the middle.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Edward Hirsch
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I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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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
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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And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me.
Edward Hirsch
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The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
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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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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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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There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the Sleepwalkers, I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
Edward Hirsch
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You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.
Edward Hirsch