Quotes from Edward Hirsch

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

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 working on its behalf.

Daydreaming is one of the key sources of poetry - a poem often starts as a daydream that finds its way into language - and walking seems to bring a different sort of alertness, an associative kind of thinking, a drifting state of mind.

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

You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.

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

I still feel that I'm capable of being as emotionally present as when I was young.

Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in as involved a way as you can.

I was surprised recently to find a book called "Poetry in Persons" that's coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.

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.

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same

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

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

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

But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

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.

And a lot of poetry is putting yourself back into the state of wonder that you have before things when you're a child. It's not only a joyous wonder, it's sometimes a grief stricken wonder.

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

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.