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" Each book should be an entity unto itself, with its own structure, character, life, name. "
Edward Hirsch
Should
Book
Own
Related Quotes:
" Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. "
Edward Hirsch
Poetry
Experience
Mind
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Writing
Poetry
University
" A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective. "
Edward Hirsch
Person
Need
You
" In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry. "
Edward Hirsch
Word
Culture
Language
" Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel. "
Edward Hirsch
Poetry
Feel
Face
" Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like. "
Edward Hirsch
Solitude
Feeling
Night
" There have always been great defenses of poetry, and I've tried to write mine, and I think all of my work and criticism is a defense of poetry to try and keep something alive in poetry. "
Edward Hirsch
Work
Criticism
Great
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Think
Work
Time
" As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you. "
Edward Hirsch
You
Creativity
Free
" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "
Edward Hirsch
Life
Art
" I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it. "
Edward Hirsch
House
Without
Poetry
" When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. "
Edward Hirsch
Thought
Everything
Write
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Dream
Trying
Create
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Feelings
Poetry
Commitment
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Dark
Writing
Myself
" I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry. "
Edward Hirsch
Poetry
Life
Spent
" I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems. "
Edward Hirsch
Writing
Become
Good
" Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. "
Edward Hirsch
Human
Grief
Always
" 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
Me
" My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me. "
Edward Hirsch
Me
Important
Experiences
" Throughout his work, Philip Levine's most powerful commitment has been to the failed and lost, the marginal, the unloved, the unwanted. "
Edward Hirsch
Lost
Powerful
Commitment
" Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty. "
Edward Hirsch
Feel
Poetry
Inspire
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Lost
Stronger
Time
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Voice
Work
Words
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
You
People
Hide
" 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. "
Edward Hirsch
Practice
Honor
Poetry
" There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. "
Edward Hirsch
Poetry
World
Never
" The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table. "
Edward Hirsch
Different People
People
Table
" It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet. "
Edward Hirsch
Poet
My Life
Absolutely
" The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. "
Edward Hirsch
Poetry
Reading
Myself