And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

Edward Hirsch

Categorized in : Past Reading Bottles

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

Edward Hirsch

creative reading adventure

Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Edward Hirsch

space giving art

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.

Edward Hirsch

great-poet poet reader

Emily Dickinson calls previous poets her kinsmen of the shelf. You can always be consoled by your kinsmen of the shelf and you can participate in poetry by going to them and by trying to make something worthy of them.

Edward Hirsch

shelves poet trying

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

Edward Hirsch

essentials poetry needs

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

Edward Hirsch

speech different use

And every year there is a brief, startling moment

Edward Hirsch

autumn home fall

You can seek clarity, you can seek warmth, you can try to make something for lasting. You can pack something in salt so that it's well made and you can hope that it outlasts time. But, ultimately that's not up to you.

Edward Hirsch

salt up-to-you trying

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.

Edward Hirsch

aztec sage keys

I put down these memorandums of my affections in honor of tenderness, in honor of all of those who have been conscripted into the brotherhood of loss.

Edward Hirsch

brotherhood healing loss

The spiritual desire for poetry can be overwhelming, so much do I need it to experience and name my own perilous depths and vast spaces, my own well-being.

Edward Hirsch

space spiritual names

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.

Edward Hirsch

pearls class book

Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency

Edward Hirsch

consistency book knowledge

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss.

Edward Hirsch

boredom expectations inspire

A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.

Edward Hirsch

soul prayer hands

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.

Edward Hirsch

lyric-poetry ideas thinking

The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art. In poetry we can't have one without the other.

Edward Hirsch

want justice art

We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else.

Edward Hirsch

able society school

Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

Edward Hirsch

doe giving religion

But, something has to be worked through formally as well as emotionally. Now, when those two things come together I've got something, I think, that I can be proud of.

Edward Hirsch

together two thinking