Edward Hirsch Thinking Quotations

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

I would say there are different kinds of poems. There are things that poets in the history of poetry hit upon when they're very young that can never be outdone and it's a remarkable, strange experience when you think of say Arthur Rimbaud who write poetry between the ages of 17 and 21 whose career was over by the time he was 22.

And it was the title August 13th for most of the way and then near the end, sometime in the process, I got the idea that maybe that would be a somewhat bland title and I got the idea for wild gratitude, which I'm very proud of as a title. So, I think it works best when you find it in the process.

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.

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.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

I think that's a connection that you can only hope for. It's not something that you can make because it needs someone else.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.

Then I found another one, grandpa's poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn't my grandfather's poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong.

I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.

I think it shapes it in very deep ways that you don't entirely understand. Rainer Maria Rilke said there are two inexhaustible sources for poetry. One is dreams, and the other is childhood. I think childhood is an inexhaustible source of your becoming who you will be and certain deep feelings are set inside of you.

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.

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.

I think it's true that that's something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

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.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.

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.

I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midlife experience, there's the late poetry in the presence of death.

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

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.

The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk, not just poetry.

I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.

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.

A stress on the system and I think a painful thing for many young poets who are looking to find a life in poetry that they're not going to be able to find.

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.

I just think that limits the kinds of experiences that people can have with poetry. But, poetry will survive; I don't worry about that. But, I do think that it may save fewer souls if people can't pay attention.

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.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.

I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.