Edward Hirsch

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.

— Edward Hirsch

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

— Edward Hirsch

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

— Edward Hirsch

Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms.

— Edward Hirsch

I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.

— Edward Hirsch

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

— Edward Hirsch

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I…

— Edward Hirsch

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence.

— Edward Hirsch

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.

— Edward Hirsch

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

— Edward Hirsch

I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves

— Edward Hirsch

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.

— Edward Hirsch

The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things…

— Edward Hirsch

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.

— 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…

— Edward Hirsch

So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do…

— Edward Hirsch

Readers bring their own experiences, their own range of - their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their own insights to poem and…

— Edward Hirsch

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We…

— Edward Hirsch

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one…

— Edward Hirsch

Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the…

— Edward Hirsch

A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and…

— Edward Hirsch

“Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That’s why it takes courage To get…

— Edward Hirsch

“Grief broke down in phrases And extrapolated lines From me without myself Tear-stained pillow of stone I felt I was lying Beside…

— Edward Hirsch

In the Middle Ages, the troubadour poets invented the concept of courtly love--a fantasy love, a noble passion, which was also extra-marital…

— Edward Hirsch

“What else are there but rituals To cover up the emptiness O Disbelief Lord Nothingness When my son's suffering ended My own…

— Edward Hirsch

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one…

— Edward Hirsch

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's…

— Edward Hirsch

I think it shapes it in very deep ways that you don't entirely understand. Rainer Maria Rilke said there are two inexhaustible…

— Edward Hirsch

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction…

— Edward Hirsch

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in…

— Edward Hirsch

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.

— Edward Hirsch

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble…

— Edward Hirsch

“am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation”),”

— Edward Hirsch

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

— Edward Hirsch

When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything.

— Edward Hirsch

“I keep scraping the canvas And painting him over again But he keeps slipping away”

— Edward Hirsch

A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.

— Edward Hirsch

I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.

— Edward Hirsch

Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name.

— Edward Hirsch

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

— Edward Hirsch