>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> Welcome to Hill Center.
I'm Diana Ingraham, the
Executive Director here.
And I have to ask how many folks
have never been in the building,
if you'll -- oh, welcome, come
back, we'd love to see you.
Take a look at all of the many bits
of literature all over your seats
and outside, and come back and
join us for something else.
Anyhow, tonight would
you take a moment
to turn off your mobile devices?
And welcome to the Fourth Edition
of the Hill Center Poetry Series,
featuring the ever passionate
and scintillating Edward Hirsch
in conversation with Ron
Charles of the Washington Post.
This is a unique collaboration
among the Hill Center,
the Library of Congress,
and the Washington Post,
Star of Media Sponsor.
The series is made possible
through the generosity
of National Capital Bank.
Many thanks to all of our
collaborators, and especially
to Mary Ann Brumbaugh
[Assumed Spelling],
who is the fairy godmother
and architect
of this series, so
thank you, Mary Ann.
The format, directly following
the conversation please join us
across the hall for an array of
artisanal cheeses and beverages
and the opportunity to buy
many of Mr. Hirsch's books,
and he has graciously
agreed to sign them.
You'll have the opportunity
to purchase A Poet's Glossary,
his most recent work
which was reviewed
in the Washington Post this
morning as an instant classic.
>> Most remarkable
thing coincidence.
>> It was an amazing coincidence.
>> Yes.
>> Anyhow, now please join me in
welcome Rob Casper, he is the Head
of the Library of Congress'
Poetry and Literature Center,
he is also the Programs Director
for the Poetry Society of America.
He served as Membership
Director for the Council
of Literary Magazines and Presses.
And 10 years ago Rob founded
the literary magazine,
Jubilat or Jubilat.
Anyway, let me turn it over to Rob.
[ Applause ]
>> Thanks, Diana.
Thanks to all of you
for coming out tonight.
It's great to have
such a capacity crowd.
This is the first time I've gotten
a chance to do this introduction,
standing behind Ron and the poet, so
I feel very like I want to sit down
and give him a hug or
something like that.
Thanks a lot to the Hill Center
for making this series possible,
and I also want to thank Mary Ann,
wherever you are --
where are you, Mary Ann?
There you are, off in the
corner making things happen
for launching this series.
Of course, this series would
not be possible without the man
to my immediate right, Ron
Charles, our moderator and guide.
In addition to his role
as the Fiction Editor
of the Washington Post, he
recently served as a Judge
for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction,
and I've got to say they did good.
But I'm ever thankful he
turns his crystal focus
on poets for the series.
Let me tell you a little bit about
the Poetry and Literature Center
at the Library of Congress.
We are the home to the poet
laureate consultant in poetry,
and we put on programs mostly at
the Library, but a few outside
of the Library, like this
one, throughout the year.
We have a sheet with our upcoming
programs that you can pick
up outside and a few brochures
that tell you more about the poetry
and literature center, and
you can visit our website
which is www.loc.gov/poetry
to see our calendar and sign
up for notifications of our events.
Hopefully, we will soon also
have the webcast of these events,
along with webcasts that will
live on the Hill Center's website.
I am honored and excited
to welcome Ed Hirsch here
as the fourth participant in
our series, The Life of a Poet.
Ed is the author of
eight poetry collections,
including Wild Gratitude, winner
of the National Book
Critics Circle Award.
He has also written six prose books,
including the national bestseller,
How to Read a Poem and
Fall in Love with Poetry.
In 2002 he began writing
the column, Poet's Choice,
for the Washington Post Book
World, and later published a book
of essays with the same name.
Ed's many honors include Fellowships
from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the
Guggenheim Foundation,
as well as the MacArthur
Genius Fellowship,
along with the Ingraham Merrill
Foundation Award, the Rome Prize
from the American Academy in Rome,
and the Lila Wallace Reader's
Digest Writer's Award.
A former Professor at Wayne State
University and the University
of Houston, Ed is currently
President
of the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation,
and since 2008 a Chancellor at
the Academy of American Poets.
As a poet and as a person Ed Hirsch
is definitively generous and joyous,
even in sorrow, and he is
a masterful truth teller.
By way of example, I can
tell you that after I bumped
into Ed last night outside
Union Station and, of course,
he took me out for an impromptu
dinner, which was full of all sorts
of conversations about poets
and poetry and lasted far longer
than either one of us
expected, I sat down at home
to read the page proofs of
his forthcoming book, Gabriel.
I was struck anew by
Ed's lyric dexterity,
his ability to write a book-length
elegy for his son that moves
with such propulsive naturalness
through pathos and reckoning.
Quote, I was unprepared for the
intensity of the heat escaping
as if I'd unsheathed the
sun, end quote, he writes.
And yet in this book Ed bravely
lets the furnace door stay open
and the flames overwhelm our senses.
It is a book only a poet fully
committed to his craft could bear
to write and a moving
testament to one
of the most agonizing
losses we can endure.
Ed is as committed to championing
poetry as any who have ever done so.
Let me tell you a second story,
a couple of months ago I had
a conversation with my staff
at the Poetry and Literature Center
about narrative versus lyric poetry.
Out of curiosity I went to the page
proofs of another of Ed's books,
A Poet's Glossary, a weighty new
tome [Assumed Spelling] covering
every imaginable definition
related to the art.
The definition of lyric, I found,
was nothing short of astonishing.
It issued dry airy edition [Assumed
Spelling] for unbridled passion.
The lyric, it states, is quote,
one of the necessary forms
of human representation,
human speech one
of the ways we invent
and know ourselves.
It proceeds prose in all languages,
all civilizations, and it will last
as long as humans, human beings
take pleasure in playing with words
and combining the sounds of words
in unexpected and illuminating ways,
and using words to
convey deep feeling
and perhaps something even
deeper than feeling, end quote.
Thank God we all have Edward
Hirsch, his poems, his prose,
and tonight himself in our lives
to help remind us why a few words
can continue to change our lives.
Please join me in welcoming
Ed Hirsch.
[ Applause ]
>> Ron Charles: I'm
glad you're here, too.
>> Edward Hirsch: Thanks.
>> Ron Charles: I'm
glad you're all here.
Thanks for coming.
As Rob said, when we thought about
this series we wanted it to be long,
longer than a book reading, less
technical than a poetry journal.
So we're going to talk
pretty seriously
about poetry for a full hour.
It's going to be demanding.
It's going to be interesting,
though.
And I'm just so glad you came and
you're giving us a chance here.
I feel kind of connected
to Ed because when I came
to The Post I started editing
the Poet's Choice column,
but he had already moved on, and
everyone told me almost weekly,
you know, no one does
it like Ed did.
>> Edward Hirsch: Thanks for coming.
I see it was a burden for you.
>> Ron Charles: And it was such a
pleasure to reread this book, too,
How to Read a Poem and
Fall in Love with Poetry.
I used it when I was
teaching English,
and it was a pleasure
to reread it this week.
You write in there that poetry
is a form of necessary speech.
Poetry is a form of necessary
speech, such a lovely phrase,
and we all wholeheartedly agree,
but imagine yourself confronted
by scoffers, philistines,
sports management majors?
>> Edward Hirsch: We've
never met any of those
in the United States, for example.
>> Ron Charles: How would you
prove, how would you convince anyone
that poetry is necessary,
particularly if they
didn't already believe that?
>> Edward Hirsch: Well, we are
living in the United States.
There are a few skeptics.
I don't think that --
can you hear me okay?
My mother told me never
to turn my back on people,
but it's very difficult
to talk to you
over here, while I'm -- you okay?
Okay. I mean I don't
know why there's --
maybe it has something to do
with the history of Puritanism,
maybe there's some ethic.
There are a lot of skeptics about
poetry in the United States.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: It's not built
into the culture the way it is
in a lot of small countries.
I mean you wouldn't ask this
question in Hungary or Russia
or even China, I think it would --
it's just a given that poetry is
part of the fabric of the culture.
So I would say that even the
most hardened business people,
even the most materialistic people
are aware that they don't want
to live in a world where money
just determines everything.
They don't want every exchange
just to be a commodity exchange.
I mean they still care
about their children,
they still care about
their partners.
Deaths mean something to them.
Weddings mean something to them.
Ritual occasions mean
something to them.
I mean I don't think there is
anyone who really doesn't want
to have some deeper experience
of what it means to be human,
and it's hard to find people
who don't have some feeling
for music, for example.
So what I say is that
people have been --
their natural feeling for poetry
has been beaten out of them,
probably for some -- by some
disapproving high school teachers,
and that if they -- if you just open
yourself up a little bit to some
of the poems that I'm going to
bring you, usually not by myself,
but as a teacher then maybe we
can get somewhere and I can try
to show you, let the poems
will speak to you in some ways
that other kinds of
language don't do.
>> Ron Charles: In one of your
essays you talk about that happening
to you when you were eight, you
read a poem by Emily Bronte,
and you said that it opened up
an unembarrassed space in you
that would never be closed,
I had been initiated
into the poetry of awe.
Describe that, what is
that unembarrassed space?
>> Edward Hirsch: I think that,
well, of course, what I'm talking
about was -- because maybe not
everyone is prepared as well as you,
scandalously not, but shocked.
When I was eight years
old my grandfather died.
If I can just say this first?
>> Ron Charles: Sure.
>> Edward Hirsch: When I was eight
years old my grandfather died,
and my grandfather had written
poetry, but he wrote it in the backs
of -- he wrote the poems
in the backs of his books.
I don't know exactly why,
but so I knew that he wrote.
He was from Latvia, and
I knew he wrote poems,
but I didn't know anything
about them.
And after he died I was
really, it was my first death
and I loved my grandfather,
and my grandfather
and my grandmother really raised
me, and I felt very desolate.
And we anthologies down in
the basement, and I went down
and I was looking at
the anthologies.
And I opened -- in those days
you had anthologies with poems
that the author of the poem was in
the back, it wasn't on the poem,
so I read this poem called
Spellbound, and I somehow imagined
that my grandfather had written it.
I thought that he had written it,
he was speaking directly to me,
and I was really comforted by this
poem and by being moved by it.
And I also say the comedy of
it was I was in high school,
all those years I thought my
grandfather had written this poem,
and I was in high school
and there was an anthology.
And I go, isn't that
strange, this poet writes
so much like my grandfather?
And then I turned to Spellbound
-- wow, my grandfather's poem.
Whoops, Emily Bronte.
So I feel that I was right
about my feeling about the poem,
but I was wrong about the author.
But what I mean by that is I
think that I came to understand
that people are embarrassed by
their feelings, that something
about feeling so much is considered
shameful to a lot of people,
especially if you're
a man, a certain idea
of masculinity that still prevails.
People still, I mean amazingly
at this date people still think
that the realm of art and the realm
of poetry belonged
to women and not men.
And, of course, not that
it doesn't belong to women,
it just belongs to all of us.
And what I mean by -- so I
think people are embarrassed
by their feelings,
and so what I said is
that poetry had opened an
unembarrassed place in me,
and I wasn't going to be ashamed,
and the poetry gave me access
to that in a way that
really changed my life.
>> Ron Charles: Nobody
writes better, I think,
than you about the way a poem
is created in the relationship
between the reader and the poem.
>> Edward Hirsch: Well,
thank you for saying so.
This is very important to me.
>> Ron Charles: You've
written about it a lot.
>> Edward Hirsch: My
teachers were new critics,
and they were very,
very smart readers.
I don't know if you
remember new criticism,
but if you're a certain age that
new criticism is a certain way
at looking at poems.
And my teachers were all new
critics and they taught us to read
for paradox and ambiguity, and
they treated poems as puzzles.
And they were very, very smart, but
they felt as if all the meaning was
in the poem and you were
sort of trying to decode it,
which I came to feel is a
mistake, as a way not to --
it's an interference between
the poem and the reader.
And I came to feel that readers
have their own experience of poems,
they bring their own
life to the poem.
The reason that a poem means
something to you is not just
because the poet wrote it, but
because you have a life yourself
and you bring your
life to that poem.
And so when I wrote How to Read a
Poem I decided that I would stand
in not for the writer,
but for the reader,
and that I would take the role
of the reader and try and go
through poems as I experienced them.
And I found that people
responded to that approach,
and that's been important to me
because I take really seriously
something that Paul Valery said,
which he says the purpose of poetry,
don't be startled by this remark,
is not to inspire the poet,
it's to inspire the reader,
that most poets think it's
to inspire themselves.
And it's true that it's
inspiring and it can be,
but that's not the function of
poetry, that's a private affair.
The function of poetry, which
is actually meant to communicate
with some other person,
is actually to inspire
that person who will read it.
And so I began to feel that this was
important, this dynamic exchange,
which all the way through
How to Read a Poem,
and everything I've
written since I try to keep
in mind the reader is the
destination of the poem,
not to reflect back to the poet,
but to reflect forward towards
the reader's experience.
>> Ron Charles: You're right,
poetry is a soul making activity,
and the reader impart authors that
activity by responding to the form
of the poem and its
way of shaping itself.
That's really, really nice.
>> Edward Hirsch: You're smart.
I like when you say this
shit, it really sounds --
it's really cheering me up.
I mean I -- you know,
there are a lot
of really smart literary critics.
>> Ron Charles: But some of
the writing is comprehensible.
>> Edward Hirsch: And I think that
they don't write about feeling.
>> Ron Charles: No.
>> Edward Hirsch: They don't, I
think they're embarrassed by it
and they don't think it's
part of the discourse.
>> Ron Charles: Right.
>> Edward Hirsch: I decided, you
know, I noticed there was such a gap
between the way poets felt
about poetry and the way
that literary critics felt
about poetry, and that I began
to feel we're speaking
a different language.
And I thought you could read
a really smart critic writing
about poetry, but it would
never tell you why someone,
like a kid like me from Chicago
with a nonliterary
background would go off
and spend his life with poetry.
>> Ron Charles: Right.
>> Edward Hirsch: Why do you want
to go spend your life with this?
Why is this so important that
you would give yourself up to it?
Why is this a vocation for so many
people, why do they feel called?
And so I felt let's
bring that to the table
when you write about poetry.
Let's see, why do people
give themselves up to this?
Why is it so significant to them?
Why does it matter?
Why do people spend their
lives writing poetry
when they could do lots
of other things instead?
Because poetry can be,
somewhat can be difficult,
it can be a different way of
getting knowledge, and there's a lot
to learn, and it can be hard.
So why do people want to do this?
Why do they want to initiate
themselves into these mysteries?
And I think it's because it delivers
something you can't get elsewhere,
and so I try to keep that in mind.
And what I try to bring to that
is I mean without any, you know,
you want to talk about the devices
and you want to talk about the forms
and you want to talk
about the rhythms
and all those things are really
important, but the end result is
for some form of what Emerson
thinks of as soul making.
>> Ron Charles: Right.
Let's talk about metaphor,
one of your terms,
I don't know how many
terms you covered
in that new book, many terms?
>> Edward Hirsch: Many terms, yes.
>> Ron Charles: The heart is a
pomegranate, blistered with seeds,
bruised and swollen with
secrets to ripe for carving.
The heart is a pomegranate?
>> Edward Hirsch: There's
something ...
>> Ron Charles: Use that
as an example to talk
about how metaphor functions
with us, between us and the poem?
>> Edward Hirsch: I see
what you're trying to do.
He's like I'm going to like
find his most outrageous thing
that this guy said
when he was young,
and I'm going to see
what we can do here.
>> Ron Charles: You talk about
the way metaphor binds the poet
and the reader together, that
together they create meaning.
>> Edward Hirsch: First of
all, there's something --
I mean a metaphor is the recognition
of something being something else.
So right away there's
a contradiction
because I can never be
something else exactly
and something can never be --
you are asserting an identity
between two unlike things,
not like a simile, which says
something is like something else
and you can see the affinity, but
a metaphor is much more radical.
It says something is something
else, and so in that charge,
which we use in daily life all
the time in all kinds of ways
in our ordinary speech, as well,
in that interchange the reason I
think the reader gets involved is
you go -- there's an
assertion, there's a claim, okay?
My claim in my poem is the
heart is a pomegranate.
That doesn't seem immediately
obvious.
So the question is how far,
let's push this a little further,
let's see if you can go a little
further in this experiment
and seeing whether the heart is
convincing as a piece of fruit.
And so you go, blistered with seeds,
you're going just another
step further in thinking
through whether this is going
to prove it to you or not,
whether you're going to
be convinced by this.
And the extended metaphor
is called the conceit
that where you just go
further and further, lovers --
you know, John Dunn [Assumed
Spelling] says lovers are
like stiff twin compasses.
You think how are they
like stiff twin compasses?
And they're going like
this as they move,
and you're either convinced
by that or not.
There is a point where
all metaphors break down.
The way I've tried to explain this
to people who seem very skeptical
about poetry, but for example
who are religious, go, well,
some people think that when
you're eating the wafer
and drinking the wine you
are tasting something like,
and some people think you are
taking the body of Christ into you.
And I think everyone suddenly
understands what you mean
when you take the metaphors from
religion, which are powerful.
And so I think poetry,
which is one of the sources
of religion operates this way, it's
a form of metaphorical thinking.
Now how far you go, whether
metaphors are good or not,
that's another question, but as a
reader you're participating in this
because it's not obvious, it's
not automatically obvious,
you have to sort of figure out,
it creates a community with you
because you have an active role
in figuring out, you may reject it
or you may accept it
or you may believe it,
but when Shelley says a poet
is a nightingale you think,
well, is a poet a nightingale?
And then Shelley goes singing
in darkness to unseen listeners.
You go, that's interesting because
a poet is not a bird exactly,
but the poet is singing in darkness
to someone who might hear it later.
That's an interesting metaphor and
it tells us something about poetry.
>> Ron Charles: Your first book
is titled, For Sleepwalkers?
>> Edward Hirsch: For
the Sleepwalkers.
>> Ron Charles: For
the Sleepwalkers?
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes.
>> Ron Charles: It includes
a poem called Insomnia.
>> Edward Hirsch: Uh-huh.
>> Ron Charles: Your second book
begins for all the insomniacs
in the world I want to build a
new kind of machine for flying
out of the body at night.
Your third book, The Night Parade,
begins with a boy falling asleep
in his grandmother's bed.
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes.
>> Ron Charles: In that
same collection you write,
for years I fell asleep
to the rhythm
of my grandfather's voice rising
and falling, filling my head
with his lost unhappy poems,
those faint wing beats
that hushed singing.
Another poem, Sleep Watch, begins
in the middle of the middle
of the night it is the dull
tom-tom thudding in your chest,
the ghostly drum roll of
voices keening in the dark,
words vibrant with
echoes, keeping you awake.
Special orders into the poem called,
After a Long Insomniac Night.
>> Edward Hirsch: You're
starting to scare me.
>> Ron Charles: There are
references to sleep and not sleeping
and not sleeping well
all through your works,
and my question is would Ambien
have changed your poetry?
>> Edward Hirsch: No.
>> Ron Charles: No.
>> Edward Hirsch: That's funny.
>> Ron Charles: Why is
sleep an issue you come back
to again and again for decades?
Are you -- no, go ahead?
>> Edward Hirsch: Well, I mean I --
I mean I think it's fairly apparent
that I have some issues
around getting some sleep.
If you want to bring in a couch
I'll lie down and talk about it.
>> Ron Charles: You
don't sleep well?
>> Edward Hirsch: No, I ...
>> Ron Charles: And you
haven't for a long time?
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes, not for --
I've had some problems in my life.
But what I would say about this
is that, yes, I'm an insomniac,
sometimes it's worse
than other times,
but I'm a lot of other things, too.
>> Ron Charles: Yes, I know that.
>> Edward Hirsch: And then not all
of them are recurrent in my poems.
I think one of the things
you're picking up is that, yes,
I'm an insomniac, but
it just can't be
that this guy is writing
every night.
>> Ron Charles: No.
>> Edward Hirsch: And, you know,
I think the thing about it is
that when I was younger especially
I hit upon insomnia as a subject,
in addition to what I was
experiencing I hit upon it
as a subject and a feeling that
I really liked inside a poem.
And what I -- and there
had been a lot of poems
about sleep and dreaming.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
>> Edward Hirsch:
And the surrealists were
especially interested in dreaming.
>> Ron Charles: Right.
>> Edward Hirsch: And
I think that so
that metaphor had been
used quite a lot,
and the romantic poets often make a
connection between sleep and death,
which is also part of
the literary repertoire.
And so I felt I had an opportunity
and that I liked the
dramatic situation
that insomnia set up inside a poem.
Now I have to say I didn't set
out when I was in my 20s to write
about insomnia for 40 years, I
would have been a little scared
if you had told me
what you just told me.
But I like the dramatic situation,
and what I mean by that is
that when you're -- not
when you're an insomniac,
but when you're writing a poem of
insomnia, the dramatic situation
of insomnia in a poem
you're the only one awake
and everyone else is
asleep, supposedly.
And that creates a feeling of
solitude, and I like that feeling
of solitude in a poem, and it
creates a feeling of a kind
of roaming consciousness.
There's a great poem by Walt
Whitman called The Sleepers.
>> Ron Charles: My next
question, go ahead?
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes, I mean the
way that he, the way he drifts
and inhabits and moves and
loosens the mind for reverie,
and I believe that this is one
of the things that poetry can do.
I mean, after all, there are
stronger logical thinkers
than poets, but poetry creates a
kind of I call it poetic thinking,
not philosophical thinking
of an associative logic
or poetic thinking, where the
mind is loosened for reverie,
and this creates a different
relationship to your interior life.
It's not just daydreaming,
you're marshalling daydreams,
but it does create a sort of
space that I like inside a poem.
There's a poem by Uri Orton
[Assumed Spelling], a Czech poet,
that begins, my friends have left,
faraway my darling is asleep.
I like that dramatic
beginning of that poem.
He has friends, he's not totally
without friends, but they're gone.
He has a darling, but she's
sleeping somewhere else.
He's alone under the lamplight.
And I realized that I just --
I felt this was one of the
dramatic situations that I could use
in a poem that would -- and there
were other, there were examples
for me, but I felt that given what
I could do this was one of the ways
that I could enter in the poem
to get at some of the feelings
that I wanted to get out, especially
about loneliness and a certain kind
of meditation, where you're
alone with your own soul.
>> Ron Charles: Right, right.
>> Edward Hirsch: The
dark soul of the night.
Dark night of the soul.
>> Ron Charles: Your
father shows up in many
of these poems, tell us about him?
It seems to me that he had
a particular kind of work?
>> Edward Hirsch: That
was a surprise
to me that my father shows up.
It never -- if you had told me when
I was 25 that I'd be writing poems
about my father I just, I don't know
what I would have done, but I ...
>> Ron Charles: Did he
sell boxes or paper or?
>> Edward Hirsch: He sold corrugated
cartons, he was a box salesman.
>> Ron Charles: Okay.
>> Edward Hirsch: I
mean I love my father.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: I mean I'm not --
I wouldn't say anything
against my father,
as a person I love my father,
but he didn't have any
feeling about poetry.
And I, when I started writing
poetry I wanted to write
about Edward Harper [Assumed
Spelling] and Paul Clay
and the European poets
that I was reading.
I mean if you'd told
me I would write
about Skokie [Assumed Spelling]
I would have been just horrified.
>> Ron Charles: But he instilled in
you certain attitudes about work?
>> Edward Hirsch: It's true,
I mean I grew up, you know,
it was a lower middle class family
and we worked, and I had a lot
of experiences working,
which I can't say
at the time I appreciated very much.
I worked a lot in factories,
and I hated the jobs,
and but I did learn a lot
about the people I was around.
And when I began to grow up as a
poet I realized I wanted to put some
of these people in the poems,
and that I hadn't seen anything
like them in poems before.
And as my father began to
age I began to figure out,
think of ways that to try and get a
certain kind of man, a certain kind
of American man, someone
I really loved into poetry
that I hadn't seen before, and
so I began to write about him.
>> Ron Charles: Would you
read this poem, Cold Calls?
>> Edward Hirsch: Do you
know what a cold call is?
Is that common in the lingo?
A cold call is -- you're
lucky that you don't know it,
I'm sorry to be the one to have
to tell you, but a cold call is
when you're a salesman, which my
father was, and a cold call is
when you have to call on
someone that you don't know.
And my father refused to retire, and
so all the people that he had known
in the business retired over time,
and he was left without any clients
because they'd all -- all
the young people came in
and they gave the business
to their friends.
And so my father at the end of his
life was making cold calls again,
which he hadn't done since his 20s.
And I discovered this one
day and I was shocked.
And so anyway I ended up writing
this poem called Cold Calls.
If you had watched my father,
who had been peddling boxes
for 50 years working the
phones again at a common desk,
if you had listened to him sweet
talking the newly minted assistant
buyer at Seagrams, and swearing
a little under his breath,
if you had sweated with him on the
docks of a medical supply company
and heard him boasting, as I did,
that he had to kiss some strange
asses, if you had seen him dying
out there then you would
understand why I stood at his grave
on those wintery afternoons and
stared at the bare muddy trees
and raved in silence to no one, to
his name carved into a granite slab,
cold calls, dead accounts.
>> Ron Charles: Did
he live long enough
to see you become an academic?
>> Edward Hirsch: He did.
>> Ron Charles: What
did he think of that?
>> Edward Hirsch: At first he
thought it was an incredible scam.
>> Ron Charles: Well, it kind of is.
>> Edward Hirsch: And then he was
just glad that I was in on it,
and he'd say do they, I mean tell me
again how many classes do you teach?
I go I teach three classes.
He goes how many hours are those?
I got they're, I think they're
an hour-and-a-half a class,
three times a week.
I mean you're like only
working like 27 hours.
I go actually it's less than that.
He goes do they know that?
I go, yes, they know.
I mean so he thought it was a
scam, but he thought it was cool
that I was in on it, but at first
very -- I mean it was, you know,
it's a certain kind of
American mentality about work.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: And ...
>> Ron Charles: When
did it occur to you
that you could do something
like that?
That you could do mental work
instead of physical work?
>> Edward Hirsch: First of all,
I really recommend those jobs
to people when they're young
because you really learn
that's not what you want to do
if you don't want to do
it, and I think a lot
of people don't know that now.
They think God granted them
an upper middle class life,
but anyway that's another story.
It didn't really occur to me.
What happened to me was I fell
in love with poetry when I went
to college, and I couldn't let
go, I just couldn't let go.
I was like a drowning person who
grabs an oar that's going by,
and I just was going to hold on.
And I just -- I felt
it was decided for me.
My parents were completely
shocked, but I was unwavering.
>> Ron Charles: They
sent you to college.
>> Edward Hirsch: They
sent me to college ...
>> Ron Charles: Your
parents didn't go probably?
>> Edward Hirsch: My parents
did not go to college.
It was actually my
football coach who got me
to Grinnell College in Iowa.
He said I want to find a
college where a freaky kid,
like you, can play football.
>> Ron Charles: Did that happen?
>> Edward Hirsch: That's
what happened.
He found this Midwest -- my parents
wanted me to go to Chicago Circle,
which is a community school in
Chicago, and you'd work part-time
and you'd go to school, and I could
only go away if I got a scholarship.
And my coach, you know, said I
think you could do something,
and he found the Midwest Conference.
These schools were
pretty good academically,
where they played football, and so
he wrote away and he found them.
And then he said the two best
ones are Carlton and Grinnell
in this Conference, and
so I went and visited.
Grinnell had a better
passing attack.
>> Ron Charles: Well, that's
helpful case to have made, yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: I was an
end, so I went to Grinnell,
and I got a scholarship and I went.
And I was already writing
poetry, but I just --
I had never met an
intellectual before.
I thought they were just super cool.
I loved my teachers, and
I began writing poetry
and I just didn't let go.
And I just had decided and,
but as time went on I began,
it became clear to me
that you couldn't --
you weren't going to earn
a living writing poetry
and so what were you going to do?
And so my compromise was
going to graduate school
and trying to become a teacher.
>> Ron Charles: You've got a poem
called In the Underground Garage,
which captures an awkward conflict
between two classes,
would you read that?
>> Edward Hirsch: Sure.
I feel like I'm going along as if
I'm in charge of the conversation,
but I see that you're
totally controlling me.
I see that I'm just saying
things you want me to say,
and I'm just being led by
you in such a graceful way.
But now I'm looking at this
poem, I go how did I get here,
I just led you, I just
pitched it up for you.
I pulled my mother's baby blue
Thunderbird into a parking garage
on the corner of Michigan and Lake
on a late afternoon in mid-December.
One of those slushy Chicago
dusks, when the air thickens
around the Christmas lights strung
through the evergreens
that line the sidewalks.
And the diligent rush hour
traffic creeps along the lakeside,
as if in obedience to
a secret commandment,
and the shoppers sift
through the fog.
The car hummed on the downward
spiraling ramp and glided to a halt
in front of a booth, where
a familiar looking attendant
in uniform, I didn't recognize him
at first, threw open a steel door
and became my closest
friend from high school,
turning away in embarrassment.
In a moment we were in each other's
arms, but he wouldn't say a word,
and already the cars were piling
up behind us, a row of impatience.
He held the keys to my mother's
car and shifted his weight back
on his heels, half in anger, half
in disappointment, as I saw him do
on the sidelines against Main South,
a linebacker's helmet
imprinted on my back.
For an instant I can see us putting
our heads together in Jake's Diner
over the memory of
kisses from Marcia
and Betty Ian [Assumed Spelling]
or driving into Niles Township
for a beer run in his
father's pea green Nova.
We working side by side in the old
factory buried below Monroe Street,
taking orders from the
foreman on the second floor,
and stacking cartons
on top of cartons
on top of heavy wooden skids.
But he didn't want to remember the
past before our futures divided,
before whatever was going to happen
between us had already happened.
The honking began in earnest,
and the cars formed a
snake-like line curving
up to the street like
souls in purgatory.
I thought of his father's
labor on the corrugators
and the printing press, the years
his mother worked a night shift
at Billings Container.
But before I could ask about
them my friend slammed the door
and screeched away in the
glistening blue car of privilege.
In silence he left me, staring after
him through the fog and steam rising
from the grated vents, at the
buttresses and concrete dividers,
the spaces misting between
us, the cars rolling
into the underground
depths at nightfall,
filled with ghosts and strangers.
>> Ron Charles: Captured so well
that feeling I'm sure we've all had
when we go home or back
to a high school reunion
or something like that.
>> Edward Hirsch: It's
a poem about class,
which we like to pretend
doesn't exist in America,
but my experience is it
does exist, and it wants to,
it tries to dramatize that in
as visceral a way as possible
because here are two friends
and one of them, my stand-in,
wants to have reunion and my friend
is so ashamed that he refuses,
it's a non-reunion, it's a
non-encounter, he won't engage
because he's so embarrassed.
And so it just, we go different
ways, and it's about something,
you know, two friends, one
goes to college, one doesn't,
and something intervenes.
>> Ron Charles: Go ahead?
>> Edward Hirsch: I was just going
to say I had a painful personal
experience about that poem,
which is now a long time ago,
but when I published it I thought
I may not publish it in a book,
I'll publish it in The Nation,
which I know my friend is not going
to read because who reads
left wing journals in Chicago.
He's a bartender then,
but he's going
out with a left wing historian.
She brought him The Nation first,
she had a subscription
to The Nation.
So he called me up, and
it was really painful
until he said there's just one
thing I just have to object to,
when you dropped that pass
against Main South there
was no linebacker's helmet
in your back, you just dropped it.
You're taking poetic license
there, and I felt relieved.
>> Ron Charles: He deserved that.
>> Edward Hirsch: I had one other
funny experience with that poem,
which is I was giving a
reading in Colorado last year,
and someone said would you
read that poem about Betty Ian?
>> Ron Charles: She was there?
>> Edward Hirsch: She was there,
she was there, but I hadn't thought
of it as a poem about her.
>> Ron Charles: No.
>> Edward Hirsch: Exactly, but I was
glad to remember the glory days, so.
>> Ron Charles: Well,
being in the middle
and upper class isn't
all about fun and games.
You've got a poem called Commuters,
which makes middle class
life sound pretty harrowing.
[ Pause ]
>> Edward Hirsch: It's that vague
feeling of panic that sweeps
over you, stepping out of the
number seven train at dusk,
thinking this isn't me crossing a
platform with the other commuters
in the worried half light of
evening, that must be someone else
with a newspaper, rolled
tightly under his arm,
crossing the stiff iron
tracks behind the train,
thinking this can't be me
stepping over the tracks
with the other commuters,
slowly crossing the parking lot
at the deepest moment of the day,
wishing that I were someone else,
wishing I were anyone else but
a man looking out at himself
as if from a great distance.
Turning the key in his car,
starting his car and swinging it
out of the lot, watching himself
grind uphill in a slow fog,
climbing past the other cars parked
on the other side of the road,
the cars which seem
ominously empty and strange.
And suddenly thinking
with a new wave of nausea,
this isn't me sitting in this
car, feeling as if I were
about to drown in the blue air.
That must be someone else driving
home to his wife and children
on an ordinary day, which ends
like other days with a man buckled
into a steel box, steering himself
home and trying not to panic
in the last moments of
nightfall, when the trees
and the red brick houses seem
to float under green water
and the streets fill
up with sea lights.
>> Ron Charles: I read that
and thought how does Ed
know how I'm feeling?
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes.
>> Ron Charles: It's
a very powerful poem.
>> Edward Hirsch: You know, I
think that part of poetry is --
I mean part of the sickness of
wanting to be a poet is that,
you know, I just hadn't seen,
commuting is something that a lot
of us have done and most people do,
but I hadn't seen poems about it.
And it just, part of you
is just a little sick,
capitalizing on what
you haven't seen,
and that I just thought there
must be a way to try and find,
to dramatize this experience which
we all have I think who commute.
I mean I started with
the premise no one grows
up to want to be a commuter.
I mean you may want to do
something and you may have a life,
but you didn't set out to be a
commuter, and you make like it more
or less, but so bring
that experience.
And I think into the poem
was interesting to me,
and then the other thing is
that I think it's not just
about being middle
class, which I am,
but it's also about being an adult,
where you just never anticipated
suddenly a certain daily life,
that you just didn't think, you
didn't imagine it for yourself,
and suddenly you go how did this
happen to me, this isn't me?
But, of course, it is you, but
you're feeling that separation.
So I got the idea one morning,
and I just decided to try
and figure out how to make a poem.
And I got the idea that it
would be a one-sentence poem,
which would just sort of have
a relentlessness about it,
it just keeps going,
where this isn't me.
But, of course, every time you
go this isn't me, you know,
it actually it is you, it is you.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
One of the interesting things about
your poetry is how often you reach
out to other forms of
art, other paintings,
particularly, music, other poets.
There are a number of
paintings in the poems --
Edward Harper [Assumed
Spelling], the Luminist paintings
at the National Gallery, the
17th Century Dutch painters,
that's in Earthly Measures, Matisse,
Monet show up in Sleep Walkers,
Georgia O'Keefe shows
up in the Night Parade,
there's Jackson Pollock, I mean
they're everywhere, painters.
Where -- how do you develop
this interest in painting?
>> Edward Hirsch: I
just like painting.
I mean I didn't, you know,
when I discovered poetry,
when I was in high
school I used to go
down to the Chicago Art
Institute downtown, and I just --
I don't know, it was part
of the world that I entered.
I mean I didn't set out to write
about painting, I set out to look
at paintings and it was part
of my education, I guess,
in becoming a person
and my idea of it.
And so I've just always
loved, I've always loved art,
and I think also arts
instigate each other.
Now later, after I'd begun to
think about writing about writing,
I thought that I could also
write about the creative process
by writing about art, not
by writing about poetry.
And I became interested in what
the Greeks called, aphoristic,
which is a certain, you know,
the writing about visual art.
And the problems of that
began to interest me.
I mean the oldest form of aphoristic
writing is Homer's description
of the shield of Achilles from the
Iliad, which is just spectacular.
And one of the things
about that description is
that we don't actually have the
shield of Achilles, we have --
it's a notional aphoristic, we
don't have the shield of Achilles,
we have Homer's description of it,
but when you read it I mean it's
so detailed that you actually think
at a certain point there
couldn't be a shield
like this, it carries so much.
But the problems of writing, from
transforming one art to another,
which is almost impossible
when writing about music,
for example, began to interest me.
And so I began to think about
how to attack an aphoristic poem.
But it began because
I liked painting,
and I just projected
myself into the paintings
and they just interested me.
>> Ron Charles: One of my
favorites is called A Still Life.
>> Edward Hirsch: I think
that's in For the Sleepwalkers.
>> Ron Charles: Could
you read that for us?
>> Edward Hirsch: This is
really when I was starting out,
and the thing about this poem,
reading this poem now is this was
one of the first poems that I wrote,
it's one of the earliest,
this is from my first book,
For the Sleepwalkers and which
came out in 1981 when I was 31.
And this poem was one of
the first poems I wrote
that I felt was something
that I could do.
I was 25 when I wrote it.
And the book kept changing, my
manuscript kept changing over time,
but this poem and two
other poems stayed,
so I felt it helped give
me my voice in a way.
I mean it was partially
because the girl I was going
out with was a painter, and
she later became my wife,
so Still Life An Argument.
Listen, it only takes a moment
to move, to knot ourselves
like the ends of a rope,
longing to be knotted together,
but let's avoid it, let's wait.
Ropes, even the sturdiest
ropes pull, they strain,
struggle, eventually they break.
But think of it, in a still life
a knife pauses above a platter
of meant, it only takes
a second and, poof,
it becomes the idea of a knife.
The drawing of a knife suspended
in the air like a guillotine,
about to weightlessly drop
on the neck of a murderer
and send him shrieking into oblivion
forever, but it never happens.
The knife keeps falling and
falling, but never falls.
That knife could be us.
The milk on the table is
always about to spill.
The meat could be encased in wax
paper to be protected from flies,
but it's not, it's unnecessary.
The flies threaten to descend on
the exposed meat, but they can't,
they're no longer flies,
but a painting of flies.
The blood pooled on the platter of
meat never evaporates, it can't.
look, it's still there,
and if I never touch you,
well, then we never die.
Listen, even lovers
have still lives.
Have whole months when they
hang together like moths
on an unlit light bulb,
waiting for the bulb to light,
but if it never does
then the moths survive.
Meat should be allowed to sit on the
table forever without being devoured
by flies, and if that's
not possible, well,
then we still have this picture, the
still life not of how it will be,
but of how it was, for the knife and
the meat and the flies and for us,
the night we hesitated together.
From now on, love, we will always be
about to destroy each other,
always about to touch.
>> Ron Charles: It's so good.
>> Edward Hirsch: Well, thank you.
I like the idea of taking a
painting, which we know a sort
of Dutch still life, and
turning it into a kind
of argument about a relationship.
>> Ron Charles: Right.
>> Edward Hirsch: I had, you know,
I had grown up on all these
metaphysical poems of seduction,
these great poems by Andrew Marvell
to his coy mistress, and John Donne,
those terrific early songs, and I
really liked the seduction poems,
which is really basically
saying, lady, let's make hay,
life is passing, time is going
on, let's hit the hay together.
And I like those poems and used them
more than once, and I got the idea
that wouldn't it be interesting as a
contemporary person to write a poem
that had that kind of
metaphysical inflection,
but was an anti-seduction
poem, which is what this is.
And so it's in that, it's in
relationship to metaphysical poetry,
I think, because it takes one
of those metaphysical ideas
and extends it, that's why it
can see because it takes the idea
of the still life being like lovers
and extends it as far as it can go
to see what it will yield you.
And in this case it becomes an
argument about a relationship,
that if we can hold, if
we could just hold this,
poise it like a still life
at this moment we'll
never destroy each other,
but we also won't fulfill
each other.
And, of course, I think the
feeling in the poem is, you know,
that's not going to
happen, that's not possible
because life is not like painting.
And I mean still lives are
shot through with death
and because they hold something in
a moment in time that you see this
in those great Chardin paintings
that they hold something
against time, but time itself goes
on, it's just held in the painting.
>> Ron Charles: I love the way
the poem reflects on the painting
and then reflects out at the
speaker at the same time.
>> Edward Hirsch: Well,
that's the idea.
I mean I think if you're going to
write poems about paintings you have
to ask the question what are
you going to bring to the table?
You don't want just to
describe the painting.
>> Ron Charles: It's already there.
>> Edward Hirsch: It's already
there, what's your way into it?
And I think that's what's
behind this kind of problem
of the aphoristic poem,
what do you bring to it?
And I've always thought it's
interesting to take things
like paintings, which seem like
they're going to be academic or seem
like they're going to be
totally intellectual and, or are,
and then bring something
really personal to them
and see what happens in the
tension between the objectification
of the are or -- and the illusion,
which sometimes can be hard
for people, with the
intent to give the feeling
that you're bringing to the poem.
>> Ron Charles: Your wife
never got you to paint?
>> Edward Hirsch: No, I have
no skills, I have no skills,
but I like the idea of trying
to transform it into writing.
>> Ron Charles: I Wish I Could
Paint You -- you know this poem?
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes,
yes, yes, a different girl.
Are you sure you're up to it?
Okay?
>> Ron Charles: Any
bad words in there?
>> Edward Hirsch: Some people
find it a little challenging.
Okay. I wish I could paint you ...
>>
>> Edward Hirsch: I
wish I could paint you,
your lanky body, lithe,
cultish, direct.
I need a brush for your hard angles
and ferocious blues and reds.
I need to stretch a fresh canvas to
catch you stretched across the bed.
I wish I could paint you from
the waist up, your gangling arms
and flat chest, your long neck.
It would take Modigliani
to capture it.
That it has caused you so much
pain holding up your proud head.
I wish I could paint you from
the waist down, your cheeky ass,
your cunt like the steely
eye of a warrior queen,
your tall thoroughbred
legs, headlong, furious,
that have ridden me to victory.
I watch you sleeping next to me
in a patch of light or stepping
out of the shower in
the early morning.
Your smile as wide as the sea and
your eyes that are deeper blue.
I wish I could paint you.
You asked me.
>> Ron Charles: Love.
>> Edward Hirsch: I just want to
say the lines that I really like in
that poem are about my partner
has really bad neck pain,
and when I thought of the
idea that it's because she has
such a proud head, it's hard for
her to hold it up, it seemed okay.
>> Ron Charles: Love is one
of poetry's oldest subjects,
grandest subjects, maybe the
subject most people encounter
in poetry the most, at weddings, on
Valentine's Day, that sort of thing.
You write very frankly
about love and loss.
And aside from the
technical challenges
and the literary concerns, is
that emotionally difficult?
I mean you're writing about intense
private experiences with people
who are still alive, still reading
your -- still interacting with you.
How does that affect the
way you present the poem,
the way you publish the poem?
>> Edward Hirsch: I think
it's important to recognize
that a love poem, I mean it's --
I can't think of a
poet who hasn't wanted
at some point to write a love poem.
I don't think there's a
person who hasn't wanted
to write a love poem at some point.
Some people don't get
over it, some people do.
But I think it's important
to recognize
that a love poem is
not a love letter,
and that a love letter is
really meant to be read just
by the beloved, I think, I
mean unless you're planning
to publish your letters it's really
meant as a private communication.
>> Ron Charles: Right.
>> Edward Hirsch: And you take
a poet, like say T.S. Eliot,
he thought that love
poems were impossible,
and the reason he thought
they were impossible
because he thought any communication
about love was a private matter
and that, I mean for him a love,
a recognition of love
was a love letter.
But if you think about poetry, the
love poem may be meant addressed
to the beloved, to a person,
and I think if it's not
it loses some power,
I mean it's not just usually
some fictitious thing,
although that's possible.
You usually have someone in mind.
Nonetheless, if you're
making it a poem you're aware
that there's a reader
on the horizon,
there's a voyeuristic quality
to this built into the exchange.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: Because the
ultimate recipient is not just the
lover, it's also the reader.
>> Ron Charles: Strangers.
>> Edward Hirsch: Absolutely.
So you're going to --
you have to be willing
to dramatize either experiences
or thoughts or feelings
that you're going to make available
to people who don't know you,
and that's part of the recognition.
A lot of love poems in the history
of poetry are fairly conventional,
that the conventions
are driving the poem.
This happened with Petrarch
in sonnets, tremendously,
that the person that the poem might
be addressed to was so drowned
out by the conventions of poetry
that you felt the conventions
were writing the poem,
not the actual beloved, and
that becomes a literary problem.
And the love poem is, in addition to
being a personal and human problem,
it's also a literary problem
because when Shakespeare says shall
I compare thee to a summer's day,
he's immediately bringing
up a problem of similitude,
and the love poem is
haunted by this question
of what can I compare you to?
And hewn he's an old dog and he
goes my mistress' eyes are nothing
like the sun, he's had it with
the Petrarchan convention now
and he wants to refuse it
because the lover has been trapped
in the conventions of comparisons.
So I think that the love poem has
its own sort of issues and problems
as a poem, and you can't escape
that if you're writing a love poem.
But I think that for me, personally,
to write a love poem it just has
to come from an authentic
experience,
it has to have a real
person in mind,
but it's not a private,
it's not a love letter.
And when there were experiences
I felt I couldn't dramatize
in my own voice, that were too
personal, that I couldn't do it,
I began to take on the persona
of other people and write
from that, their perspective.
And I wrote a book called
On Love, which has a group
of poems called The Lectures
on Love, in which I speak
through the voice of
Gertrude Stein and Colette
and various other figures
to try and get at some stuff
that I couldn't get at myself.
>> Ron Charles: Let's
read one of those now?
[ Pause ]
>> Edward Hirsch: Did
you have one in mind?
>> Ron Charles: D.H.
Lawrence, he knew something
about love, or at least sex.
>> Edward Hirsch: D.H.
Lawrence is the speaker.
It's called The Short
History of Love.
After the sweet red wine and the
dry lecture, the History of Love
in Western Imagination, history
is loveless without imagination,
we could not abide another
listless lecture, and so we slipped
into the castle library and pushed
hide-backed chairs against the door
that refused to lock,
so jammed the door,
and knelt to each other
in the library.
I confess my fear of
patrolling watchmen.
You seem courageous
and sure, as always.
I've learned to adore
your myriad ways
of taking us back into
man and woman.
And when we lay naked
among the books,
the bookshelves enclosed a
sacred garden for Adam and Eve,
safely restored to Eden, ourselves
immersed in a paradise of books.
>> Ron Charles: The library is hot.
>> Edward Hirsch: I mean I felt
I gained something by attributing
that poem to D.H. Lawrence,
as opposed to speaking
it in my own voice.
>> Ron Charles: In How to
Write a Poem you write we live
in a superficial media
driven culture
that often seems uncomfortable
with true depths of feeling.
Indeed, it seems as if our culture
has become increasingly intolerant
of that acute sorrow, that intense
mental anguish and deep remorse
which may be defined as grief.
You've written a number
of elegies in your life,
there's a particularly powerful one
about your mother-in-law
dying, called Blunt Mourning.
Could you read that?
[ Pause ]
>> Edward Hirsch: One morning,
July 15th, 1979, I'll never forget
that morning when my mother-in-law
floated in a nether world
of morphine induced sleep,
those lingering hours
of an otherwise ordinary Sunday,
when she entered into a country
that wasn't sleep, so much as a blue
comatose state of semi consciousness
that she inhabited
to avoid the pain.
On that blunt sunlit morning we
signaled each other and talked over
and around her emaciated shape,
propped up on the pillows
for what were obviously her final
hours of life on this earth.
She was breathing heavily.
She was laboring in her
non-sleep, in her state of drifting
to wherever it was she was going.
And suddenly I couldn't
stand it any longer.
I moved next to her
and began talking.
I didn't ask any questions.
I didn't know what I was saying,
I was speaking so quickly.
I said that we were all there, all
of us, Janet and Sophie and Susan,
who was playing the
piano in the living room,
that we loved her intensely,
fiercely,
that we missed her already.
Where was she?
We wished we could do
something, anything.
That we have to each have tasks
to fulfill on this planet,
and her job now was to die,
which she was doing so well,
so courageously, so gracefully.
We were just amazed at her courage.
I know she could hear me, and
that's when she opened her eyes
and fixed me with her stare.
She wasn't moving, but she was
looking me precisely in the eyes.
I'll never forget that look,
haunted, inquisitive, regal.
And she was speaking, except
her voice was too weak
and the sounds didn't rise beyond
her throat, but she was speaking.
And that's when Janet and Sophie
started singing Hebrew songs,
not prayers or psalms,
but celebratory songs
from Gertrude's childhood
in Detroit.
And she was singing, too.
She remembered the words.
Except we couldn't hear any words,
nothing was coming out of her mouth,
but she was tapping two fingers on
the side of the rented hospital bed
and her lips were moving.
She was singing.
That's when Sophie started telling
stories about their childhood,
which seems so far away and
so near, like yesterday.
And Gertrude was nodding,
except her head didn't move,
but anyone could see
that she was nodding yes.
And then Janet started talking about
her childhood, in this very room,
where sunlit burnt
through the curtains.
And then suddenly Gertrude jolted
forward and started waving her arms.
What is it?
What is it?
What is it?
Because she was choking on her
own phlegm, and then she fell back
against her pillows,
and stopped breathing.
[ Pause ]
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.
And it's important to face it.
I mean in our country we just
want to box it up into periods
and say there are stages and get
on with it and forget about it,
and we don't want to face the fact
of it, which is that we lose people
and we don't recover from
losing them, and that we go on,
we manage, but we do lose them.
And so the elegy has a long history,
as long as there has been poetry
there have been lamentations
to help the dead, ease
the dead on their passage,
there's never been a poetry
without the poetry of lamentation.
And I think it's important,
it's an important part of life.
It's an important literary tradition
because it's one of the fundamentals
of human life, something we
can't reconcile ourselves to.
>> Ron Charles: You've got a
book coming up in the fall,
called Gabriel, it's about your son.
Tell us about him and how
he came into your life?
>> Edward Hirsch: We adopted Gabriel
when we were in our late 30s,
and he was only six days old.
And we raised him.
>> Ron Charles: He did not
have an easy adolescence?
>> Edward Hirsch: He
had a hard time.
He had a lot of disorders.
>> Ron Charles: You've
written a book called Gabriel,
to borrow a phrase from
one of your earlier poems,
reads like a white
grief stricken whale.
>> Edward Hirsch: I haven't
really talked about this.
I was -- I told you before that I
was surprised you had read it yet,
I didn't know the proofs were out.
I'm not really sure
how to talk about it,
except to say that it's important
to try and memorialize people,
and there's something really
awful about writing an elegy
for someone who is younger than you.
Part of the nature of the fact
of Blunt Mourning, for example,
is it's really awful, but you do
expect your parents to die in front
of you, and it is part of
your job to see them through,
and that's what I felt I
was doing with Janet's --
what Janet and I were doing and
then what I tried to do in my poem,
and try and dramatize the last
moments of Gertrude's life.
But 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.
>> Ron Charles: The book takes
us through his whole life,
from the adoption, through his
childhood, through his adolescence,
till he dies at 22 in 2011.
>> Edward Hirsch: I
become one of the feature,
it's not the only feature of the
book, but one of the features
of the book is I become Gabriel's
biographer, and I tell his story
in poems, but I do tell his story.
And I tried really hard to
capture his personality,
his outlandishness, and his ...
>> Ron Charles: Impulsiveness.
>> Edward Hirsch: ...
impulsivity.
I tried to create a form
to capture his impulsivity,
his wildness really, and so
that people would have a
feeling for what he was like.
>> Ron Charles: It's an
absolutely devastating book.
At one point you say I'm
scared of rounding him up,
of turning him into a story.
So I can imagine why
you write such a thing.
Why publish this intensely
private tragedy?
>> Edward Hirsch: I'm not sure
of the answer to that, actually.
I don't know exactly
the answer to that.
>> Ron Charles: Many parents
will find comfort in this,
who have gone through
this experience.
>> Edward Hirsch: Well,
that would be a consolation,
and that would be one answer, but
you can't claim that for yourself.
I'm certainly not the only one.
Other people, in fact, everyone is
initiated at some point into a kind
of grief that is unbearable to them.
I don't think anyone escapes this.
It may not be your child, but you --
I have a poem about
this in the book,
about everyone is carrying
an invisible bag of cement
on their shoulders, and that's
why it takes courage to get
up in the morning and
step out into the day
because everyone is carrying
an invisible bag of cement.
And it's -- if they seem
like they don't it's only
because they're either too
young or you don't know them
because no one escapes
unscathed with this.
If you love people, the price
of loving them is losing them,
and one of the things that
poetry can do is to try
and give you something of
them back, and if not them
at least can memorialize
how you felt about them.
It may not give them -- you may not
have them back, because you don't,
but you can at least
say what you felt.
And one of the things that
poetry does is leave a record
of what it felt for us to be here.
And I just, I guess I wanted
to leave something behind
of what I felt about this
and capture something
of his, of what he was like.
>> Ron Charles: It really does.
It also captures the years
of panic in your own life
and your partner's life in
trying to take care of him,
someone who is self-destructive,
someone who has a variety
of diagnosed and undiagnosed
problems, and all the therapists
and all the doctors
and all the people
who aren't always very helpful.
Some of them weren't
helpful, at all, apparently.
>> Edward Hirsch: Well, you -- I
just wanted to try and create --
I didn't want it just
to be about his death,
I wanted to create the
experience of what it was like.
And being a parent is a
very humbling experience.
When I was young I completely
believed in nurture over nature,
I completely -- I thought
sociobiology was a crock,
and I was sure that
the culture ruled
and that nature didn't have
anything to do with it,
and whatever we did we
could fix and we could make
and that we made our own lives.
And then you have a child, and
your child is given to you,
and you discover that there are
only certain things you can do.
That you have -- you're very
limited in what you can do.
Your child has a nature.
You have a job to try and protect
your child and do your best,
but they have an independent
life, and the limits
of what you can do are the limits
of your intelligence and your help
and everything like that.
And so I tried to dramatize
that in the poem.
I think part of it is that while I
never thought I'd write any of this,
while Gabriel was alive I
wrote very little about him.
I always felt it was okay
to write about your parents,
blasting them as part of the
deal, after all, they brought you
into the world, they knew
what they were doing,
but your child didn't have
anything to do with it.
And so I considered
him mostly off limits.
I wrote a couple of poems, one
about a adopting him and one
about following him around when he
was 16 and I felt he was flying off.
But so after he died I suddenly
had an overwhelming feeling
about everything we'd lived
through, and I just wanted to try,
I had to do something with my
grief, so I tried to articulate it.
>> Ron Charles: You had some
model, you had many models,
In Memoriam comes to mind.
>> Edward Hirsch: I'm
crazy about In Memoriam.
>> Ron Charles: It's
a gorgeous poem.
>> Edward Hirsch: It's
a really great poem.
It's a very undervalued
poem, I think,
because people think it's
sentimental, but I think it's one
of the great book-length ...
>> Ron Charles: Do you remember
how it ends, these lines here,
if you could read those
lines, the last two stanzas?
>> Edward Hirsch: It's
Tennyson's poem
for Arthur Hallam,
who he loved so much.
That man, the man, the man that
with me trod this planet was a noble
type, appearing err
the times were ripe.
That friend of mine,
who lives in God,
that God whichever lives and loves.
One God, one law, one element,
and one far off divine event,
to which the whole creation moves.
It's interesting that you've
singled it out, this out,
because this is the part of In
Memoriam that I like the least.
I consider it completely fraudulent
that Tennyson is grief
stricken throughout the poem and
but he is a Victorian and at the
end he's trying to put a Band-Aid
over what cannot be bandaged,
and he comes up with I think
a completely unconvincing,
in my opinion, maybe he believed it,
but a completely unconvincing
positive spin
on this experience
by turning it to God.
I mean I understand the
impulse, but I think it's fake
and I think it really
mars In Memoriam,
which is a very great poem.
But another way to think about this
is that Tennyson is an English poet
of the 19th Century and
these are his values
and this is part of the poem.
But it's the part of the poem
that speaks the least to me.
>> Ron Charles: Your
poem ends with God, too.
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes, my
poem ends without forgiveness.
>> Ron Charles: You end with the
lines, I will not forgive you,
indifferent God, until
you give me back my son.
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes, my poem
is unreconciled, and it --
it's funny, the odd thing about
it is it keeps arguing with God,
it keeps saying, God,
you don't exist.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: God,
you let me down and,
God, I don't believe in you.
>> Ron Charles: Yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: It keeps
telling God I don't believe in him.
>> Ron Charles: So who
are you talking to?
>> Edward Hirsch: Exactly,
who are you talking to?
>> Ron Charles: Who
do you not believe in?
Emily Dickinson had
that same tension.
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes.
I have a poem called The
Partial History of my Stupidity,
and parenthetically I say
in the poem, I'm still angry
at God for no longer existing.
I can't give up the idea of
God, I guess, and I can't give
up God exactly, but I also can't
believe him, I can't believe in him,
and I can't take comfort
in the idea.
So I wasn't thinking of Tennyson
exactly, but you've found
that it is exactly what
I'm speaking against.
>> Ron Charles: Right, yes.
>> Edward Hirsch: The turn, which
I hate in religious services,
which I know gives people
comfort but doesn't comfort me,
when they turn away from the
person and find some comfort.
I can see why that people
want it and why they need it,
but my poem is unreconciled.
>> Ron Charles: In that poem you
mentioned, The Partial History
of my Stupidity, you say, forgive
me faith for never having any,
I did not believe in
God, who alluded me.
>> Edward Hirsch: I thought that
was funny because, first of all,
apologizing to faith seemed odd
to me, for not believing in you.
I didn't have any, but
I believe that, too,
that I mean it would have
been nice to be gifted
with faith, but I don't have it.
And then I think that I did not
believe in God who alluded me.
I really liked the
word alluded there
because the word alluded suggests
not that God doesn't exist,
but God does exist but he's just
outside your ability to get him,
but I don't believe in you, is
to say I don't believe in you,
but alluded means you
exist but I can't find you.
So I like the paradox in that.
>> Ron Charles: Dickinson
has those horrible silences
where God withdraws,
the forest is empty.
>> Edward Hirsch: She's doing it
in a really terrifically clever way
because she's also
fracturing the him,
she's using the traditional
religious vocabulary to question God
and to fracture the him in the
address to a non-existing God
who keeps -- she wants to
find him even more than I do
because of the way she's raised, and
she's working in the 19th Century,
but God keeps withdrawing on her.
And, of course, she also sees him
as this major patriarchal figure.
>> Ron Charles: Fumbling
at her soul.
>> Edward Hirsch: Yes, yes.
>> Ron Charles: We can't leave
this people like this, you know?
Would you read In Spite
of Everything, The Stars?
[ Pause ]
>> Edward Hirsch: It's funny
that you bring this poem up now
because when I was writing
this book, Wild Gratitude,
which I saw as a kind of
journey down into the underworld
of my own grief and then historical
grief because there are a lot
of Holocaust poems, I also began
to conceive of it as a journey out,
as a journey down and back up,
and which is how I've often tried
to construct my books, as a
sort of a voyage and you go down
and you come out into the light.
And this is part of -- one of a
series of poems, where I'm trying
to turn up towards something,
find grounds for affirmation,
and this is I think what
you're looking for, too.
In Spite of Everything, The Stars.
Like a stunned piano, like a bucket
of fresh milk flung into the air,
or a dozen fists of confetti
thrown hard at a bride,
stepping down from the altar,
the stars surprise the sky.
Think of days, stones
floating overhead or an ocean
of starfish hung up to dry.
Yes, like a conductor's expectant
arm about to lift toward the chorus,
or a juggler's plates
to find gravity,
or a hundred fastballs fired
at once and freezing in midair,
the stars startle the
sky over the city.
And that's why drunks leaning
up against abandoned buildings,
women hurrying home on
deserted side streets,
policemen turning blind corners,
and even thieves stepping
from alleys all stare up at once.
Why else do sleepwalkers
move toward the windows
or old men drag flimsy lawn
chairs on to fire escapes,
or hardened criminals press
sad foreheads to steel bars,
because the night is
alive with lamps.
That's why in dark houses all over
the city dreams stir in the pillows,
a million plumes of
breath rise into the sky.
[ Applause ]
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