Poet's Choice

by Hirsch, Edward

• ISBN13: 9780156032674
• ISBN10: 0156032678
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-04-02
• Publisher: Mariner Books

Summary

Edward Hirsch began writing a column called "Poets Choice" in the Washington Post Book World in 2002. This book brings together those enormously popular columns, some of which have been revised and expanded, to present a minicourse in world poetry. Poets Choice includes the work of more than one hundred poets from ancient times to the presentamong them Sappho, W. B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, Primo Levi, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Amy Lowell, Mark Strand, and many moreand shares them with all of Hirschs inimitable enthusiasm and joy. Rich, relevant, and inviting, the book offers us the fruits of a life lived in poetry.

Author Biography

EDWARD HIRSCH is the author of six books of poems and three books of prose, among them the national bestseller How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix de Rome, and a MacArthur Fellowship, and is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in New York.

Excerpts

Nightingalessprings messenger, the lovelyvoiced nightingaleSapphoI wish Id been on the street in Madrid on that night in 1934 when Pablo Neruda, who was then Chiles consul to Spain, told Miguel Hernndez that he had never heard a nightingale. It is too cold for nightingales to survive in Chile. Hernndez grew up in a goat herding family in the province of Alicante, and he immediately scampered up a high tree and imitated a nightingales liquid song. Then he climbed up another tree and created the sound of a second nightingale answering. He could have been joyously illustrating Boris Pasternaks notion of poetry as two nightingales dueling. I once told this story to the writer William Maxwell, and he said that learning how to sing like nightingales in treetops ought to be a requirement for poets. It should be taught, like prosody, in writing programs. The Romantic poets might have agreed: Wordsworth called the nightingale a creature of fiery heart; Keats inscribed its music forever in his famous ode (Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!); John Clare observed one assiduously as a boy (she is a plain bird something like the hedge sparrow in shape and the female Firetail or Redstart in color but more slender then the former and of a redder brown or scorched color then the latter); and Shelley declared:A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.The singing of a nightingale becomes a metaphor for writing poetry here, and listening to that birdthat natural musicbecomes a metaphor for reading it. One could write a good book about nightingales in poetry. It would begin with one of the oldest legends in the world, the poignant tale of Philomela, that poor ravished girl who had her tongue cut out and was changed into the nightingale, which laments in darkness but nonetheless expresses its story. The tale reverberates through all of Greco-Roman literature. Ovid gave it a poignant rendering in Metamorphoses, and it echoed down the centuries from Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus) to Matthew Arnold (Philomela) and T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land). One of my favorite poems about springs messenger is by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist, who may never have heard a nightingale, and yet, through poetry, had a lifelong relationship with the unseen bird.To the NightingaleOut of what secret English summer eveningor night on the incalculable Rhine,lost among all the nights of my long night,could it have come to my unknowing ear,your song, encrusted with mythology,nightingale of Virgil and the Persians?Perhaps I never heard you, but my lifeis bound up with your life, inseparably."MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; tab-stops: 24.0pt"The symbol for you was a wandering spiritin a book of enigmas. The poet, El Marino,nicknamed you the siren of th

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Excerpted from Poet's Choice by Edward Hirsch
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