HIRSCH, Edward (Mark)

---

Nationality: American. Born: Chicago, Illinois, 20 January 1950. Education: Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa, 1968–72, B.A. 1972; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1975–79, Ph.D. in folklore 1979. Family: Married Janet Landay; one son. Career: Assistant professor of English, 1978–82, and associate professor of English, 1982–85, Wayne State University, Detroit; since 1985 professor of English, University of Houston, Texas. Awards: Seldon L. Whitcomb Poetry prize, Grinnell College, 1970–72; Academy of American Poets First Place award, 1975–77; Gustav Davidson Poetry award, New York Poetry Society, 1977; Amy Lowell Traveling fellowship, 1978; Ingram Merrill Foundation award, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1982; I.B. Lavan Younger Poets award, 1983; Delmore Schwartz Memorial award, 1985; Guggenheim fellowship, 1985; Texas Institute of Arts and Letters award, 1987; Stover poetry prize, Southwest Review, 1987; Rome prize, American Academy in Rome, 1988; Robert and Hazel Ferguson Memorial award in poetry, 1990; Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writing fellow, 1993; Lyndhurst prize, 1994–96; award in literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1998; MacArthur fellowship, 1998. D.H.L.: Grinnell College, 1989, Elon College, 1994. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Daransoff and Verrill, 179 Franklin Street, New York, New York 10013, U.S.A. Address: 1528 Sul Ross, Houston, Texas 77006, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

For the Sleepwalkers. New York, Knopf, 1981.

Wild Gratitude. New York, Knopf, 1986.

The Night Parade. New York, Knopf, 1989.

Earthly Measures. New York, Knopf, 1994.

On Love. New York, Knopf, 1998.

Other

How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. New York, Harcourt Brace, 1999.

Responsive Reading. Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Editor, Transforming Vision. Boston, Bullfinch Press, 1994.

*

Critical Studies: "'"Spots of Time': Representation of Narrative in Modern Poems and Paintings" by Suzanne Ferguson, in Word & Image (Basingstoke, Hants, England), 4 (1), January-March 1988; "Artful Dodge Interviews: Stuart Dybek and Edward Hirsch" by Benjamin Seaman, in Artful Dodge, 14–15, fall 1988; "'"Emotional Temperature': A Conversation with Edward Hirsch" by Stan Sanvel Rubin and Judith Kitchen, in The Post-Confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties, edited by Earl Ingersoll, Judith Kitchen, and Stan Sanvel Rubin, Rutherford, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989; interview with Edward Hirsch by Kevin Boyle, in Chicago Review, 41 (1), 1995.

*  *  *

Edward Hirsch is a very likable figure in his poems; he levels with the reader about his emotions, tells stories that are everyone's experience, and has dark things to say about life in general that go directly to the heart. If one were to distill the quality that makes him so popular with critics and the general reader, it would be his youthful sincerity. Hirsch writes from the feelings of a young man of sensitivity and with the soul of a poet growing up in cold, slushy Chicago. He relives the shocks of puberty and manhood in language that lifts the merely personal to the level of myth. Therein lies both his power and his warmth.

Hirsch's poetry descends from very old sources in America. The lofty rhetoric comes from Poe, as does some of his somberness and brooding on death. Hirsch is a symbolist and writes about the landscape and his daily life as if it were a dense, brilliant metaphor of his psychological life. This can be seen, for example, in "Dusk" from his first book, For the Sleepwalkers:

   The sun is going down tonight
   like a wounded stag staggering through the brush
   with an enormous spike in its heart
   and a single moan in its lungs. There
 
 
   is light the color of tarnished metal
   galloping at its side, and fresh blood
   is steaming through its thrust. Listen!
   The waves, too, sound like the plunging
 
 
   of hooves, or a wild hart simply
   crumpling on the ground.

Hirsch owes much to T.S. Eliot in the way of irony, self-detachment, and quick shifts of logic. If there is something essentially Hirschean about him, however, it is the moderated, tightly controlled surrealism he applies to his details:

   Look for the spangled scar of a crayfish
   Crawling backwards, always crawling backwards
 
 
   Over the veined map and dried parchment
   of Apollinaire's shaved head. See how it
 
 
   Creeps out of the pale blue chapel of his skin
   Into the deep trenches and dry riverbeds
 
 
   Curving all the way from the occupied bank
   Of his damaged ear to the eastern front
 
 
   Of his forehead.

Hirsch's picture of the world involves a certain amount of dislocation of the ordinary through exaggeration, repetition, and reversals. To some extent he is the beneficiary of two decades of translation of Spanish, French, and Central American poetry, which expanded the vocabulary of American poetry and gave writers a freedom to express more of the dream logic of imagination.

Hirsch brings to the Catholic imagination, which W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, and Mark Strand translated so effectively, something of the Jewish mind in America, the burden of sorrow from a long history of persecution. The pain Hirsch describes in lyric effusions brings the Jewish past to life, filtered through the complex political worlds of Mexico, Franco's Spain, and imperial French colonies—a rich layering of thought and history that has earned Hirsch his wide reputation as a master of lyric confession.

Hirsch has matured over the years from a one-poem-per-page format to longer, bolder meditative poems engaging in literary subjects and taking on the masks of other poets, a voice-projecting form of tribute at which he is particularly adept. He has parodied many voices, including those of Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval, Marianne Moore, Isaak Babel, Paul Celan, Matisse, Rilke, Vallejo, Lorca, Pound, Eliot, and others. Witness the specificity of the following language from "At the Grave of Marianne Moore," a canny imitation of the subject's famous style, even to the plumb-centered stanza:

This was a woman who paid dazzling attention
   to all the minor nuances of motion;
 
 
   the bobbing heads of birds, the strict tension
 
of snakes slithering through the weeds,
 
   the marvelous quickness of badgers
   who raced through their cages like perfect athletes,
   almost as artful as her beloved Dodgers.

The later book The Night Parade continues the theme of insomnia established in For the Sleepwalkers. The night parade contains the chimeras, monsters, and ghostly haunters of the night hours, when most of us are asleep. The poems brood on the more Poe-like extremities of the verse landscape, the creatures who lurk in memory or fantasy and are grasped only by lyric means. Hirsch's prefatory poem, "Memorandums," describes the book as a sort of journey into the underworld:

   We will be lifted up and carried a far distance
   On invisible wings
   And then set down in an empty field.
   We will carry our hearts in our bodies
   Over shadowy tunnels and bridges.
   Someday we will let them go again, like kites.

The journey is harrowing and includes visits to dead grandmothers, other relations, friends, and the unborn. "The Abortion" tells a story of young love that ends on the abortionist's table, where a girl is worked on who is not even pregnant. "I'll never forgive you. Nothing is forgiven," the lover says years later to the speaker.

In Hirsch's award-winning Earthly Measures the persona goes in search of God and finds only the shadows, dust, and flimsy memories of spirit in the world. It is at once a very dark book and a tour de force of lyric energies. Hirsch has found his tune here, and he sings large, complex oratorios in perfect pitch.

—Paul Christensen