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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Edward Hirsch

Poetry

Song

Music

" I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences. "

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

Edward Hirsch

Landscape

Always

" I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet. "

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

" 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 like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth. "

Edward Hirsch

Warmth

Poems

" 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. "

" I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation. "

" Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings. "

" Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms. "

" As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations. "

" 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. "

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

" Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause. "

" A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem. "

" You are always trying to make something that is more than the sum of its parts. "

Edward Hirsch

You

Trying

" When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. "

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

" The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. "

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