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" '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. "

Edward Hirsch

Wave

Small

Work

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" Poetry takes courage because you have to face things and you try to articulate how you feel. "

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

" One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I read a lot as a kid and in high school. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. "

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

" 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'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. "

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

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

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

Edward Hirsch

Warmth

Poems

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The Portuguese and Galician term 'saudade' suggests a profoundly bittersweet nostalgia. "

" The very good thing about MFA programs is their democratizing. They bring a lot of different people to the table. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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