Edward Hirsch
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Edward Hirsch is a poet and teacher of literature who writes in English. Born on January 20, 1950, in Chicago, he is an American citizen who went on to study at Grinnell College and later at the University of Pennsylvania.
His career has brought him recognition from a range of literary and academic institutions. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the William Riley Parker Prize.
The MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals whose work has drawn sustained attention, stands as one of the more notable honors among those he holds.
Quotes by Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch's insights on:
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 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.
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.
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.
I was surprised recently to find a book called “Poetry in Persons” that’s coming out about visit to poets to a class that Pearl London gave.
There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the “Sleepwalkers,” I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
Ultimately you’re trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can’t do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of – express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.
As a reader you have a task to do, you have something to do. You bring your experience to it. It’s not all inherit in the poem.