“It’s part of your job, as a poet, to write out of experience. To name what matters to you. You’ve only got one life to draw on.”

On Yeats’s assertion that one must choose between the life and the work: “Of course, if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats's dictum is true. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude.”

“The real event of the 1980s was . . . the emergence of great looting fortunes . . . which made us revise the value of everything—not to the benefit of society . . . ”

“[As a child] I was so fascinated by these watercolors in a book about Indians that I began teaching myself to read the captions . . . So I associate learning to read English . . . with wanting to know about Indians. I'm still growing into it.

“A Calypsonian performer is equivalent to a bullfighter in the ring.”

“In the navy, when we were flying, instead of saying, ‘Take care of yourself,’ people would say, ‘Don't crash and burn.’ I don't know how funny it was, but we thought it was hilarious.”

No one ever leaves
the building across the street
and I can’t explain why
I spent the summer
staring at its blank windows
and stony facade, its caged trees,
while the sun crawled
across the light-blue emptiness
yawning with clouds.

We walked down the path to breakfast.
The morning swung open like an iron gate.

I. THE CRAVING
                The Odyssey, Book Twelve

I needed a warning from the goddess
and a group of men to lash me to the mast
hand and foot, so that I could listen

We stood in the midst
   of a great alluvial plain
         and felt the horizon coming

One night in Portugal, alone in a forlorn
village at twilight, escaping her parents,
she saw a full moon baptized on the water

It’s the broken phrases, the fury inside him.
Squiggling alto saxophone playing out rickets
And jaundice, a mother who tried to kill him

Work drives you like wind
between suburban houses, emptying cans.
You are invisible as air

Nearly fifty years on, Edward Hirsch remembers his college football days.

Edward Hirsch remembers his long friendship with the late W. S. Merwin