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A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.

Edward Hirsch

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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Certain
Back
Looks
Kind
Older
Perspective
Poetry
Experience

More quotes by 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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There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
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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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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You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.
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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Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.
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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There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.
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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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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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
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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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There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this.
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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The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.
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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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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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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That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.
Edward Hirsch