Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950—his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins—and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award.
Since then, he has published six additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994),On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of poems.Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
“I need to live like that crooked tree--...that knelt down in the hardest windsbut could not be blasted away.”
“Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.”
“A Partial History of My StupidityTraffic was heavy coming off the bridgeand I took the road to the right, the wrong one,and got stuck in the car for hours.Most nights I rushed out into the eveningwithout paying attention to the trees,whose names I didn't know,or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.I couldn't relinquish my desiresor accept them, and so I strolled alonglike a tiger that wanted to spring,but was still afraid of the wildness within.The iron bars seemed invisible to others,but I carried a cage around inside me.I cared too much what other people thoughtand made remarks I shouldn't have made.I was slient when I should have spoken.Forgive me, philosophers,I read the Stoics but never understood them.I felt that I was living the wrong life,spiritually speaking,while halfway around the worldthousands of people were being slaughtered,some of them by my countrymen.So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--and forgot to attend to those who sufferedfar away, nearby.Forgive me, faith, for never having any.I did not believe in God,who eluded me.”