About Edward Hirsch

In 2003, Edward Hirsch left his eighteen-year teaching post at the University of Houston and moved to New York City to become the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. At the time, his decision to accept such a position surprised many of his colleagues and students, who knew him as a generous, passionate, and natural teacher, and an integral force in building the UH Creative Writing Program into one of the elite writing programs in the country. But the move also made perfect sense, as the Houston Chronicle recognized, announcing that Hirsch had "found a bigger bully pulpit."

Hirsch, whose own lyric poetry yokes together an intrinsic intellect and a profound emotional depth, has been an unflagging advocate for the art. For more than twenty-five years—in essays and newspaper columns, at conferences and festivals, in classrooms and auditoriums, at galas and fundraisers—he has proselytized, taught, and championed poets and poetry of every ethnic and aesthetic stripe. "If you think that poetry—American poetry and poetry from other countries—has something to offer the larger culture," he says, "then poetry needs some people who are willing to speak on its behalf and to do the work of not only devoting themselves to their own poems, but also taking up the cause of poetry's place in the culture. Some people are called to do that and others are not. I don't think that there's a hierarchy here. But I do think that American poetry suffers if everyone turns away from these larger tasks." The fact that Hirsch has turned to these larger tasks speaks volumes about the man and the poet: his deep-seated sense of civitas within the world of poetry, his ebullient spirit, and his lifelong love affair with his art.

Born in 1950 in Chicago, Hirsch's first initiation into poetry came at the age of eight. As the story goes, he was picking through a box of musty books in the basement of his home when he opened an anthology to an anonymous poem. What he read—Emily Brontë's "Spellbound," he would discover years later—immediately arrested him. In his book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, he describes this first brush with the ecstatic powers of poetry: "I suppose that in some sense I never really shut that worn anthology of poetry again because it had opened up an unembarrassed space in me that would never be closed. I had stumbled into the sublime. I had been initiated into the poetry of awe." Despite this early encounter with poetry, Hirsch describes himself as an emotional and distracted child, obsessed with sports, who didn't naturally gravitate towards reading, but had to be coaxed by his mother. She encouraged him with books about sports, and something took hold.

By the seventh grade he was deep in Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights and never turned back. His grandfather, too, was an important figure during his childhood, an abiding presence of affection and tenderness, and an early source of language and poetic possibility. "I adored my grandfather," Hirsch says. "He came from Latvia and had Old World manners. He was wry, witty, affectionate, displaced. He never quite adjusted to the American marketplace, never quite figured out how to earn a living. I seem always to have been aware that he wrote poetry. He copied his poems down in the backs of his books, which didn't strike me as strange until I was much older. He wrote from right to left in Hebrew, and I had no idea what his poems were like. He also quoted poetry to m—Shakespeare and Keats—without ever identifying it. I just thought of it as part of the pool of the English language." His grandfather's native language and European sensibilities would inform both Hirsch's own poetry and his love, as a reader, for poetry from other countries. He acknowledges, in fact, hearing his grandfather's accents and tonalities in the Eastern European poetry he began to discover in his early twenties. "It felt like I was recognizing something, and it called to me," he says. "It spoke to something in me that I didn't hear in English and American poetry. I loved the combination that I found of high intellect and great tenderness."

Hirsch attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where he played baseball (outfield) and football (tight end), earning Academic All-American honors. After Grinnell, he went on to complete a Ph.D. in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. His first book, For the Sleepwalkers, appeared in 1981, a highly praised debut that received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His career catapulted from there. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Four more volumes of poetry have followed since—The Night Parade (1989); Earthly Measures (1994); On Love (1998); and Lay Back the Darkness (2003)—and four astute and appreciative books of criticism on poetry and art—Responsive Reading (1999); How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999); The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002); and Poet's Choice (2006). Hirsch has been honored with many of the most prestigious awards in letters, including fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.

At a time when so many poets whittle themselves down into defining personal styles and subjects—into what the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski has dubbed "deft miniaturists of a single theme"—Hirsch has remained remarkably open, a restless, questing, and ravenous poet of the world. Formally, his poems resist being pigeonholed, but there's never any doubt that they've been shaped by a rigorous maker, proving solid enough to bear strong emotional swells and supple enough to follow the quick movements of a keen mind. Hirsch is a poet as comfortable and capable in the fixed form of a villanelle (see the exquisite and moving "Ocean of Grass" in On Love) as he is in the unpredictable cadences and movements of a dramatic monologue (see the whole sequence of monologues in, again, On Love), or of an elliptical and lean lyric sequence (see the fabulous ekphrastic poems in Lay Back the Darkness—"The Horizontal Line," "Evanescence," and "Two Suitcases of Children's Drawings"—which insistently circle their subject matter and illuminate it from various angles).

This terrific formal scope reflects the wanderings of a poet who travels vast distances in his poems, inward and outward, across time and space, between praise and lamentation. Hirsch has written elegiac and tender poems about his childhood, his family, and his Jewish heritage. He has also written poems that wield a shrewd historical consciousness, taking on such subjects as the devastating European plague of the fourteenth century, torture in the twentieth century, and the Chicago fire of 1871. His poems have traversed the gritty, urban decay of the American city; the sunstruck peaks of Greece; the windswept, scoured absence of the early plains; and numerous other real, imagined, and mythic landscapes. He has written heartrending elegies and soaring homages to artistic geniuses as varied as Art Pepper, Paul Celan, and Georgia O'Keefe. In fact, Hirsch's poetry tends to be a gathering place for a whole cast of literary and cultural figures, from Simone Weil to Henry James, from Wallace Stevens to Orpheus.

When asked about these writers and thinkers that often appear in his poems, Hirsch says, "They're not just literary figures to me. I like to try to remember that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It's a human art. When you're reading poets or thinkers deeply, you feel as if you know them better than the people around you. I've never quite understood when critical readers take them to be academic performances. The work by the figures I'm writing about is work that I've always experienced very intimately." Perhaps the strongest testament to this feeling manifests in the sequence of monologues in On Love, where a pantheon of literary figures speak on Eros. Amongst such notables as Charles Baudelaire, Zora Neale Hurston, and Colette appears Oscar Ginsburg, Hirsch's beloved grandfather. It's a symbolic gesture that simultaneously elevates the grandfather into this gallery of luminaries while drawing the literary giants down into the real world, into the flesh-and-blood family.

At mid-career, Hirsch's body of work and cache of distinguished awards would already add up to a tremendous lifetime of achievements for many poets. What's even more remarkable, and admirable, in Hirsch's case, is that he's been able to achieve so much with his own poetry while persistently acting as an unfaltering voice of advocacy on behalf of the art. Those lucky enough to have encountered him in a class, or on the lecture circuit, or even in one of his books of criticism, have been inspired time and again by his infectious enthusiasm. The way he speaks and writes about poetry —unpretentiously, with immediacy, with unfeigned candor and feeling, and with unwavering intelligence—moves against the current of so much of the chilly, jargon-ridden, and hyper-specialized literary criticism that's in vogue. It's a fact that's not lost on Hirsch. "At a certain point I decided—because I was frustrated by criticism and a little appalled by the way that poets had turned over the craft to literary theorists without advocating on behalf of their own art themselves—to change how I myself write about poetry," he says. "I wanted to see what would happen if when you wrote about poetry you were always emotionally present without any sacrifice of critical apparatus or intelligence or erudition. And I wanted to see if I could write about poetry in a way that would speak to two audiences: those who are initiated into poetry and knew a lot about it, and those who are not initiated into poetry, those who didn't know much about it. I wanted to see if you could write in a democratic way that would welcome people to poetry without any lowering of your standards."

This approach worked. How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry was a national bestseller and captured the attention of scores of readers, new and old alike, with its powerful explorations of the lyric and narrative modes, and poetry's relationship to grief, ecstasy, history, praise, and prayer—to name a few of its many subjects. In The Demon and the Angel, Hirsch refined this critical style and extended it to other art forms, including film, dance, music, and painting, as he engaged the concept of duende and delved into the impetus of creativity, vision, and imagination, examining artistic examples as various as Robert Motherwell, Martha Graham, Charlie Parker, William Blake, and Federico García Lorca.

His latest endeavor, Poet's Choice, gathers together most of the pieces written during his three-year tenure for The Washington Post Book World poetry column. He writes on more than one hundred thirty poets from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and the United States in short entries, most of which top out at three or four pages. Though brief, these pieces are replete with Hirsch's characteristic warmth and sharp insights. Hirsch began the Book World column shortly after September 11, 2001, and though the book is not arranged chronologically, the historical weight of the moment is often palpable. There are pieces on poetry and suffering, women and war, protest poetry, and poets from all over the world who have written from the abyss of tyrannical violence or war. The ground note for the whole mood of this new book is struck in an introduction that hovers somewhere between a prayer and a call to action:

Poetry is a means of exchange, a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift. There has never been a civilization without it. That's why I consider poetry—which is, after all, created out of a mouthful of air—a human fundamental, like music. It saves something precious in the world from vanishing. It sacramentalizes experience. . . . Poetry speaks with the greatest intensity against the effacement of individuals, the obliteration of communities, the destruction of nature. It tries to keep the world from ending by positing itself against oblivion. The words are marks against erasure. I believe that something in our natures is realized when we use language as an art to confront and redeem our mortality. We need poems now as much as ever. We need these voices to restore us to ourselves in an alienating world.

In the book as a whole, as he does here, Hirsch reminds us of the redemptive and necessary power of poetry, of its ability to nourish us in the darkest of times.

Hirsch recently began his fourth year as the President of the Guggenheim Foundation, and when asked how things are going, he speaks of the deep gratification he derives from guiding an organization that supports the lives of individual artists and scientists. "It's thrilling to be able to support people to do their work. And it's also very exciting to watch their professional lives get a big boost. Often, people change levels, and that's really a pleasure. It's nice to be part of that." Luckily, too, the demands of the job have not eclipsed his writing time. He's completing his seventh book of poetry at the moment, titled Special Orders, and expects it to be published in the spring of 2008. When asked if he still thinks of himself as a teacher, he answers emphatically: "Oh, yeah. I think part of my writing about poetry is the same project as my teaching. I mean, I run the Foundation, but my inner life remains part of the culture of poetry. And teaching poetry is very much on my mind. Sometimes it's not in classrooms now, but my writing about poetry is meant to be in the same spirit as my teaching." We can be glad for that. In the ever-deafening buzz of our contemporary culture, we're lucky to have a voice like Hirsch's that keeps calling us back to poetry—a voice that keeps calling us back to the life of the mind, the life of the heart.

Brian Barker is the author of a book of poems, The Animal Gospels, winner of the Editors' Prize from Tupelo Press. His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Agni, The Indiana Review, and Blackbird . He is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Undergraduate Creative Writing at Murray State University in Kentucky.