Every poem is a scene of language. It is a rite without a ceremony.
Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
Tag: poetry
And that disturbing loss of equilibrium, that radical redefinition of time, that entry into an atemporal present, is one of the key features of lyric poetry.
Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries.
No, not exactly, since the smallest was
a miserable philosophy.
Elizabeth Bishop “Crusoe in England” Geography III. Farrar. (1976)
And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?
Gwendolyn Brooks “truth” in Annie Allen. Greenwood Press (1949)
I really love you,
believe me. It is something I inherited
from my mother.
From Attila József’s “Attila József” which Edward Hirsch calls his “love poem to himself.”
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
W.B. Yeats Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917)
Writing is embodiment. Reading is contact.
Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
No, I don’t feel death coming.
I feel death going:
having thrown up his hands,
for the moment.
James Baldwin. “Amen.” Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. Beacon Press. (2014)
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop “One Art” in Geography III (1977)
Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said […] Rhythm is all about recurrence and change. It is poetry’s way of charging the depths, hitting the fathomless. It is oceanic.
Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
