Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Ends
Titles
Best
Hopefully
Come
Beginning
Writing
Usually
Late
Getting
Process
Experience
Emerge
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
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
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
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
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
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
think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
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
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
I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves
Edward Hirsch
Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
Edward Hirsch
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
Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.
Edward Hirsch
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
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
Gertrude Stein said, I write for myself and strangers. I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward Hirsch
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
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
When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.
Edward Hirsch
The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.
Edward Hirsch
