Edward Hirsch

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting.

As far as I'm concerned, freedom is the most important thing to creativity. You should feel free to write in whatever way, whatever language, feels comfortable to you.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

And every year there is a brief, startling moment _x000D_ When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and _x000D_ Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless _x000D_ Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: _x000D_ It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; _x000D_ It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

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.

Poems mesmerized me, and I felt better when I was writing them, or trying to - more in touch with something deep and dark within myself.

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.

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.

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

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

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.

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

In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods.

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

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

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

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.

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.

Anyone who has lost a child will tell you that they don't recover their sense of endless possibility. Some people hide that well. But after a certain age, almost everyone is carrying something like that around, I suppose.