Quotes from Edward Hirsch

I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, "This must thou eat." And I ate the world. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is always something about them that evades the understanding, and I have tried to remain aware that, as Paul Valéry has put it, "The power of verse is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition.

Learn about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo," the seventeenth-century master of haiku, Matsuo Bash?, wrote in a series of insightful reflections on poetry. I would extend Bash?'s wisdom about nature, and about the poetry of nature in particular, to include the particular nature of poetry: learn about poetry from the poem .

These poems have come from a great distance to find you. I think of Malebranche's maxim, "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.

Poetry is a form of necessary speech.

The poet of Whit-manesque ambitions must find a way to present something that has as its sole purpose taking things away.

There is an enormous abyss between subject and object.

I am a tiny seashell that has secretly drifted ashore and carries the sound of the ocean surging through its body.

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

And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

All that rescues us is love.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night The mountaintop is not in sight Because there is no mountaintop Poor Sisyphus grief I did not know I would struggle Through a ragged underbrush Without an upward path ... Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That's why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day.

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

I wish I could believe in the otherworld I wish I could believe in a place Of reunions outside of memory

Look closely and you will see Almost everyone carrying bags Of cement on their shoulders That's why it takes courage To get out of bed in the morning And climb into the day

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, "leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.

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

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

The poet would befriend and comfort himself, if only he could.

If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, 'You're out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?' But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.

When Ungaretti lost his nine-year-old boy He understood that death is death In an extremely brutal way It was the most terrible event of my life I know what death means I knew it even before But when the best part of me was ripped away I experienced death in myself From that moment on It would strike me as shameless To talk about it That pain will never stop tormenting me

Grief broke down in phrases And extrapolated lines From me without myself Tear-stained pillow of stone I felt I was lying Beside him in the coffin Wormy mother Who takes us into the ground With her whenever and wherever She wants the grass glistens And grows over us in the heat Of late summer in the country

We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us.