The Art of PoetryNo. 110
EDWARD HIRSCH
Edward Hirsch is the author of ten poetry books, most recently Stranger by Night (2020). His debut, For the Sleepwalkers, published in 1981 when he was thirty-one, won the Lavan Younger Poets Award. It was followed by 1986’s National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Wild Gratitude. These first collections set the stage for others, such as On Love (1998) and Lay Back the Darkness (2003), that spotlighted a poet of both emotion and intellect, a poet as able to explore metaphysical subjects as to give voice to the disenfranchised.
Gabriel (2014), Hirsch’s ninth book, is a virtuosic confessional sequence in tercets about the life and death, at twenty-two, of his troubled son. The National Book Foundation noted, “Gabriel enters the broad stream of human grief and raises in us the strange hope, even consolation, that we find in the writer’s act of witnessing and transformation.” When I asked Hirsch to identify a common undercurrent in all his books, he said, after some thought, “Human suffering.” But grief is not his only register—the elegies that weave his collections are complemented by love poems, poems informed by history and politics, and poems after art and artists.
Hirsch, whose honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Prix de Rome, and a MacArthur Fellowship, has also written several books about poetry, most notably the encyclopedic A Poet’s Glossary (2014), which was spawned by the popular How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999). As editor and critic, he has taken on subjects including John Keats, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, William Maxwell, Theodore Roethke, Wisława Szymborska, nightingale poems, the sonnet, and visual art. He has conducted five interviews for The Paris Review, among them conversations with W. S. Merwin, Derek Walcott, and Susan Sontag. “My most stressful one was with Sontag,” he recalled. “She considered it the definitive interview with her as a novelist, but it took me several days to get her to cop to the fact that she was an essayist, too.”
Between 2017 and 2019, I met Hirsch four times at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s office in Midtown Manhattan, a stone’s throw from Grand Central Terminal. He was proud to point out his book collection, lining the walls of a foyer, a reception area, and his large office. “You can tell they’re poetry by how thin they are,” he joked. I was treated to a spectacular view as we talked, before me a large southern exposure, the Empire State Building looming on the right, the East and Hudson Rivers visible beyond skyscrapers. Hirsch, who spent more than twenty years teaching at the University of Houston and Wayne State University, has been the foundation’s president since 2002, the first practicing artist to be appointed to the role. “Suddenly, I had a different kind of day job,” he said. “There’s a staff, there are budgets, there are hundreds of outside readers, there are art juries, there’s a board of trustees. I was no longer on an academic timetable. But I’ve adjusted.”
Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and grew up there. Broad-shouldered and tall, a competitive athlete in high school and college, he naturally transmits his physical presence to his words, imbuing them with gravity even when he is joking. His gaze is concentrated and powerful. His considered responses reflected a no-nonsense approach to work, and only briefly, when my questions turned to Gabriel, did I sense in his voice a surge of emotion, on the brink of overflowing but kept in check.
INTERVIEWER
What’s so funny?
EDWARD HIRSCH
I was thinking of something—it always makes me laugh—that Joe Brainard said to a friend of mine on the phone and my friend shared with me. It was a very sad call because Joe was dying of aids-related pneumonia, but then he brightened up a little. “Well,” he said, “at least I don’t have to go to any more poetry readings.” He paused. “But you do.”
INTERVIEWER
How many poetry readings do you think you’ve gone to?
HIRSCH
Let’s just say that I’ve put in my ten thousand hours.
INTERVIEWER
What’s wrong with poetry readings?
HIRSCH
Nothing. I just don’t like to be bombarded. Most readings just make me slink farther and farther down in my seat. But I’ve had a few transformative experiences and so I keep coming back for more. Once, at Bread Loaf, I heard Brigit Pegeen Kelly read her poem “Song.” It was mythic. I heard C. K. Williams read his shocking poem “The Gas Station” in Philadelphia, and Philip Levine recite his great poem of rage “They Feed They Lion” in Detroit. I once listened to Mark Strand read his entire book Man and Camel in an apartment in New York City—it was both droll and magisterial. When I was in graduate school, I heard Elizabeth Bishop read “The Moose” at Bryn Mawr. She seemed like a very unwilling reader, but the poem is spectacular. I was fixed to my chair.
INTERVIEWER
When did you give your first reading?
HIRSCH
I was twenty-five years old. I’d
