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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Edward Hirsch

Poetry

Think

Help

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

" 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. "

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

Edward Hirsch

Important

Experiences

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Life has to have the plenitude of art. "

Edward Hirsch

Life

Art

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "