Poets v. Prose Writers | Edward Hirsch | Big Think

Poets v. Prose Writers

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Edward Hirsch had too much adrenaline to construct stories.

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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: Can poets learn from fiction writers?

Edward Hirsch: 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. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative. That is many poets don’t know how to tell a story and they don’t have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn’t just you and also creating a narrative structure. So, I think it’s true that that’s something that poetry can go to school on fiction. I think poetry can go to fiction to learn.

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we’re not writing journalism when we’re making literature. We’re trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it’s hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don’t also read poetry. That 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. So, I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

Question: Have you tried your hand at fiction?

Edward Hirsch: When I was young I did. In fact, when I was young I wrote everything and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything. When I was in my early 20’s I still had that idea and I wrote an unpublished novel and I wrote a lot of short stories. But what I discovered about myself is that my temperament is so fiery in terms of what I think in literature, that I like so much intensity that too much was happening all the time. It was just like starting with too much adrenaline and you stayed at that adrenaline rush all the time.

Well, it turns out that doesn’t work for fiction. 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. And so, I found my temperament is very much drawn to lyric poetry and for the compression of lyric poetry. So, it seems that I have the temperament of a poet, not entirely of a fiction writer.

Question: What words are you looking for as a poet?

Edward Hirsch: There's a debate in the whole history of poetry between the plain style and the golden or ornate style and that poetry is continually in some kind of relationship between these two pulls. Something more baroque and ornate, something more ornamental and something more plainspoken, something simpler. And I feel the tugs of those two traditions in, say, the 17th century or in Spanish baroque poetry or the work of John Donne who I admire very much.

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