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" 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. "

Edward Hirsch

Immigrant

Childhood

Grandfather

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

" I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read. "

" You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf. "

" My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader. "

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

" 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

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

Edward Hirsch

Important

Experiences

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try. "

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

" 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. "

" Fresh or changing conditions ferment fresh forms. "

" 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. "

" 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. "