Quotes from Edward Hirsch

I did not know the work of mourning Is like carrying a bag of cement Up a mountain at night

Poetry is a voicing, a calling forth, and the lyric poem exists somewhere in the region—the register—between speech and song.

Writing fixes the evanescence of sound and holds it against death.

He could never stand still but now Something that had once been my son Lay there restless spirit Who left the house one rainy night And never returned Lost boy Who will never be found again Anywhere but eternity

Like a spear hurtling through darkness He was always in such a hurry To find a target to stop him Like a young lion trying out its roar At the far edge of the den The roar inside him was even louder

Jonson wrote a poem and called his son His best piece of poetrie A lovely line a little loathsome I loved that poem once He said we are lent our sons never take Too much pleasure in what you love

Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. 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'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

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

I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.

I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.

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.

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.

So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I've gotten it, it's pretty much completed.

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

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.

You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.

The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text.

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.