I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
“am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. This is my nature and vocation”),” — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn't also been a great reader of poetry. This… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
So, some of the most difficult formal poems that I've written, say one sentence sonnets, I've been able to do those fairly… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share Image
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… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
“I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night The mountaintop is not… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
“Fall" Fall, falling, fallen. That’s the way the season Changes its tense in the long-haired maples That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
I think in terms of educating a group of readers, MFA programs are very good. I just think the model of MFA programs in… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
“Jonson wrote a poem and called his son His best piece of poetrie A lovely line a little loathsome I loved that poem once… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
...I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
The attention deficit disorder of the culture is very distressing in America now and I think it puts a lot of things at risk,… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do… — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel. — Edward Hirsch Copy Share
