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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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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Much
Teachers
Like
Teacher
Strange
High
Given
Found
Anthology
School
Grandfather
Looks
Poem

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
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One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
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But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.
Edward Hirsch
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I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.
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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I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.
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.
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It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
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.
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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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The great post-Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, said that a poem is a message in a bottle sent out in the not always greatly hopeful belief that somewhere and some time it would wash up on land on heartland perhaps.
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There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.
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.
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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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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.
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