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" I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief. "

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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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Edward Hirsch

Warmth

Poems

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

" I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" My cultural experiences were as important to my formation as many of the other things that happened to me. "

Edward Hirsch

Important

Experiences

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

" The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost. "

" I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "