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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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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Needs
Touch
Writing
Poetry
Gives
Alone
Write
Feelings
Need
Access
Giving
Deeper
More quotes by Edward Hirsch
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
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
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
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
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
A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Edward Hirsch
A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.
Edward Hirsch
The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.
Edward Hirsch
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
Gertrude Stein said, I write for myself and strangers. I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward Hirsch
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
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
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
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
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
I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.
Edward Hirsch
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
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
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
I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.
Edward Hirsch
