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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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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Night
Realms
Best
Early
Think
Outside
Thinking
Late
Life
Morning
Times
Social
Found
Realm

More quotes by 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 would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
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The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.
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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I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves
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.
Edward Hirsch
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One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss.
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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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'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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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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Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
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