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Big Think Interview With Edward Hirsch

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Edward Hirsch:

Edward Hirsch's first collection of poems, "For the Sleepwalkers," was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then, he has published several books of poems, including "Special Orders" (2008) and "Lay Back the Darkness" (2003). His latest book, "The Living Fire" (2010), his first retrospective collection, selects from each of his seven previous collections, published between 1981 and 2008.

He has been a professor of English at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What was the first thing you read that made you want to become a poet?

Edward Hirsch: When I was eight years old my grandfather died and I knew that he had written poetry because I used to see him writing poetry in his books and I was very close to him. And after he died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather’s death and I thought my grandfather had written it. In fact, I was sure he had written it and it was a great consolation to me and something planted in my mind that you could write poetry, that you could read poetry, that poetry could somehow console you. I didn’t sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

Now, when I was in high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, “That’s so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather’s poem.” Then I found another one, grandpa’s poem. It turned out it had been written by Emily Brontë and it wasn’t my grandfather’s poem at all, although my response to it, I think, was pretty much the same, I just had the author wrong. But, that was the beginning, though I didn’t start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.

Question: When did you begin showing people your poems?

Edward Hirsch: When I was in high school I used to show them to my sister and I thought everything I wrote was so great and my poor sister who is a year younger than I am couldn’t understand them at all. But, she was enthusiastic about my writing them. When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone. She somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn’t try to make anything.

The oldest word for poetry in Greek is “poesis,” which means making. A poet is a maker and a poem is a made thing. And Carol somehow convinced me that I could become a poet but that I was not writing poetry and that I would have to try and make something to write poetry. I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path. I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn’t writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.

Question: What is the best way to learn how to write poetry?

Edward Hirsch: There's been no poet, no great poet in the history of poetry who hasn’t also been a great reader of poetry. This is sometimes distressing to my students when I tell them this. Now, I do say, “It’s possible. You might be the first. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the odds are very much against you.” All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.

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