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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

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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Writing
Usually
Late
Getting
Process
Experience
Emerge
Ends
Titles
Best
Hopefully
Come
Beginning

More quotes by 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 didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.
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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Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
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 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
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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 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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Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.
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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So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.
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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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