Edward Hirsch

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

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

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

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

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. ”

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s. ”