Edward Hirsch Poems Quotations

I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.

The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.

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.

Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.

I believe in rooting poems in actual places, even if you move into some other extraordinary realm.