I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.
From Edward Hirsch
I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve.
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.
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.
I come from Chicago, and the landscape of the Midwest has always meant a great deal to me.
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.
You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try.
As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.
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 terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
10 perspectives
9 perspectives
8 perspectives
1 perspectives