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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

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Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Always
Think
Thinking
Poets
Ended
Poet
Open
Learn
Long

More quotes by 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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I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves
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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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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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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Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.
Edward Hirsch
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I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship.
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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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
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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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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
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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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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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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
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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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When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.
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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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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Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
Edward Hirsch