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" James Salter is a consummate storyteller. His manners are precise and elegant; he has a splendid New York accent; he runs his hands through his gray hair and laughs boyishly. "

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" 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. "

Edward Hirsch

Poetry

Think

Thinking

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

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

" Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind. "

" Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms. "

" The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone. "

" 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. "

" Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

Edward Hirsch

Important

Experiences

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

" 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 aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The idea of a poem as a message in a bottle means that it's sent out towards some future reader, and the reader who opens that bottle becomes the addressee of the literary text. "

" 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 you can read poetry while you're watching television very well. "

" 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. "