Best 118 quotes of Edward Hirsch on MyQuotes

There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table.

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.

Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.

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. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.

When you find it you become the secret addressee of a literary text and I felt that their reader had been left out of this experience of reading poetry or what the experience of poetry was.

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

You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.

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.

Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poems After his two youngest children Died from scarlet fever Within sixteen days of each other In 1833 and 1834 he could not cope And often thought they had gone out For a while "they'll be home soon" He told himself to tell his wife "They're only taking a long walk" Mahler scored five of those poems In 1901 and 1904 for a vocalist And an orchestra to break your heart As soon as I heard the plaintive oboe And the descending movement of the horn And the lyric baritone entering I felt I should not be listening To Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Kindertotenlieder with the Berlin Philharmonic Mahler's wife was superstitious And thought he was chancing disaster With Songs on the Death of Children "Now the sun wants to rise so brightly As if nothing terrible had happened overnight That tragedy happened to me alone" Mahler knew he could never have written them After his four-year-old daughter died From scarlet fever three years later He said he felt sorry for himself That he needed to write these songs And for the world that would listen to them

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.

Why did the sun rise this morning It's not natural I don't want to see the light It's not time to close the casket Or say Kaddish for my son I've already buried two fathers With a mother to come Isn't that enough Lord who wants us To exalt and santify Him I don't want to wear the mourner's ribbon Or wake up crying every morning For God knows how long I don't want to tuck my son into the ground As if we were putting him to bed For the last time Close the prayer book I will not pretend That God brings peace upon us And upon all Israel I don't want to hear anyone Scolding me from her wheelchair Because I'm crying too hard I'm not worried about a heart attack Nothingness You've already broken my heart I will not forgive you Sun of emptiness Sky of blank clouds I will not forgive you Indifferent God Until you give back my son

Words floating in air, lines cut on a page, stanzas carved into units. Poetry is a mode of associative thinking that takes a different route to knowledge than philosophy, its ancient antagonist. It follows its own wayward but resolute path.

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