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

Edward Hirsch

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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Poems
Start
Didn
Back
Writing
Mind

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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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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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.
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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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.
Edward Hirsch
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It's not important - it's not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.
Edward Hirsch
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Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.
Edward Hirsch
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When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.
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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She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
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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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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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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I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.
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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Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.
Edward Hirsch
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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.
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