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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Edward Hirsch

Deep

Sorrow

Grief

" Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted. "

" There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. "

" 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. "

" There's something really unnatural about losing a child, and there's something unnatural about having to write an elegy for your child, but I felt that I wanted people to know what he was like. "

" As soon as something happens to us in America, everyone begins talking about healing. But before you heal, you have to mourn. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry. "

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

" 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

Important

Poet

" Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name. "

" One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you. "

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

Edward Hirsch

Life

Art

" 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. "

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

" I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me. "

Edward Hirsch

Landscape

Always

" There are a lot of poems where I am questing for God. I don't think there is any finding of God. "

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

" I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it. "

" 'Liberty Brass' is a small machine that unfolds in a single unpunctuated wave, which is interrupted by the rotating sign, the refrain. Each part is meant to do its work in relentless progression. "

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

" The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational. "

" I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music. "

" 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. "

" Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry. "