Dr. Edward Hirsch
Edward Hirsch Edward Hirsch was born in Chicago in 1950 and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in folklore. He is the author of six books of poems: Lay Back the Darkness (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); On Love (1998); Earthly Measures (1994); The Night Parade (1989); Wild Gratitude (1986), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award; and For the Sleepwalkers (1981), which received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from The Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He has been a professor of English at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
______________ Press Release Edward Hirsch appointed President of the Guggenheim Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has named a prize-winning poet and scholar to succeed Joel Conarroe, who will step down as president in January after seventeen years in office. Edward Hirsch, the president-elect, is the author of five books of poetry (with another forthcoming), three books of non-fiction, and numerous essays in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, he is currently completing a five-year term as a MacArthur Fellow. The John and Rebecca Moores Professor at the University of Houston, he holds a Ph.D. in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as honorary degrees from several institutions. Mr. Hirsch won the poetry prize of the National Book Critics Circle in 1987 for Wild Gratitude, and was awarded the William Riley Parker Prize from the Modern Language Association for the best scholarly essay in PMLA for the year 1991. The author of a weekly column on poetry for the Washington Post Book World, he has given readings and lectures throughout the world, most recently in Poland, and has for the past several years served on the Guggenheim Foundation's Committee of Selection. "There is nobody," Joel Conarroe has said, "better suited by intelligence, imagination, and temperament to lead the Foundation at this particular time. I am delighted to be leaving an institution I cherish in such capable hands." (Mr. Conarroe, in addition to presiding over the Foundation, is president of PEN American Center.) Joseph A. Rice, the Foundation's Chairman, led the search committee during several months of considering nominations and interviewing candidates. "All of us on the Board," he said, "are extremely pleased to welcome so gifted, productive, and impressive an individual to this important position. We are confident that Edward Hirsch will maintain the high standards that have always characterized the selection of Guggenheim Fellows." Established in 1925 by Senator Simon Guggenheim and Mrs. Guggenheim as a memorial to a son who died at age seventeen, the Foundation offers year-long fellowships to artists, scholars, and scientists through a yearly competition. Edward Hirsch will be only the fourth presiding officer in the Foundation's seventy-eight year history.
Harcourt Press Release “We need poems now as much as ever,” writes Edward Hirsch in the introduction of Poet’s Choice. “A poem, “he writes, “beats out time.” In Poet’s Choice, Edward Hirsch, who is also the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, writes about all kinds of poems, from the famous to the obscure, and in doing so continues the dialogue and exchange of voices that is so essential to how we all talk about what is transpiring in our world. The poets featured in this wonderful collection include: Jorge Luis Borges, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sappho, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Czeslaw Milosz, Primo Levi Thom Gunn, Robert Frost, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Penn Warren, Louise Gluck, Naomi Nye, Sutart Dybek, Robert Pinsky, and so many more. Edward Hirsch, who is also the author of the bestselling How to Read a Poem, is a great literary citizen who can talk convincingly and enthusiastically about the power of poetry and how it changes us, restores us, helps us grieve, and contributes to our joy. There is no one better – in April, National Poetry Month, or any other day of the year – to discuss the relevance of poetry in our culture, right now. He can also discuss:
Harcourt Release - News POET'S CHOICE by Edward Hirsch In early 2002, Edward Hirsch began writing a weekly column, "Poet's Choice," in The Washington Post Book World. The column, Hirsch writes, felt "especially relevant to a post-9/11 world, a world characterized by disaffection and materialism, a world alienated from art." It became enormously popular.
In 2006, after handing the column over to Robert Pinsky, Hirsch has revised and expanded his ground-breaking columns into POET'S CHOICE (Harcourt, April 3, 2006, ISBN 0-15-101356-X, US $25.00). Here is the work of poets famous and obscure, American and international, introduced or re-introduced to the reading public in an accessible, enthusiastic, and joyful way. Here is poetry that runs the gamut from lesser-known writers like Adam Zagajewski and Czeslaw Milosz to literary giants like William CarlosWilliams and Pablo Neruda. As Hirsch states in the introduction, "Poetry is a means of exchange, a form of reciprocity, a magic to be shared, a gift. There has never been a civilization without it." The poems featured in POET'S CHOICE consistently grapple with death, suffering, and loss. They portray and communicate on behalf of people at the margins of society, exiles, transplants, people with no country, people split between the past and the present. They search for meaning - in language and forms particular only to poetry - in the face of emptiness, for communion in the face of isolation. Poems are always in dialogue with other poems, and in conversation with history, and, like this book, they invite readers into that conversation. 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. __________________
BOOK REVIEWS: Out Far and In Deep
A poet reminds us of the way poetry teaches us to see, feel, and think.
Poetry, writes Edward Hirsch in Poet's Choice (Harcourt), his new book of short, provocative explorations of this essential art, "creates a space for reverie, for night mind. Through poetry I enter a primary zone where silence reigns and the constant din of the culture momentarily stops, where i can feel what I think and think about what I'm feeling, where I can hear a solitary human voice rising out of the primordial darkness."
People have been shaping words into the compelling rhythms of poetry ever since we've had language. Poetry is our elemental, common property; nobody really owns it, and you can't collect or possess it in the way you can a painting. A poem is more like a perpetual gift - something to be received, cherished, and passed on. But if poetry is one of the great human accomplishments, the collective history of our hearts, then why isn't everyone reading it? Of course, a great many readers do cherish favorite poets, but we all know poems aren't topping the best-seller lists; nor are they on sale at the newsstand or supermarket. (Though in come countries they are; in his native Chile, you can buy books of Pablo Neruda's aching and celebratory verse from vending machines while you're waiting for the subway.) In the United States, poetry has an ardent but small band of devoted readers. Hirsch sets out to remedy this situation in this lively collection drawn from his columns in The Washington Post. A master appreciator, he likes nothing better than to introduce us to a poem and point to what he loves about it. The range of his choices is huge, from ancient Rome to contemporary Palestine, Aztec poets to young Americans writing today. In this loving, enthusiastic guide, one experienced reader's warmth and openheartedness help to unlock the treasure of poetry for a world of new readers. - Mark Doty POET'S CHOICE by Edward Hirsch Hirsch celebrates poetry as a "human fundamental" in his incantatory introduction to this brimming collection of 130 masterfully distilled essays based on the famed "Poet's Choice" columns he wrote with passion and imagination for the Washington Post Book World for three years, beginning soon after 9/11. As in his cherished best-seller, How to Read a Poem (1999), Hirsch, a natural-born teacher as well as a poet, shares his extraordinary erudition and love for poetry with lucidity and intensity, empathically summarizing the lives of poets past and present, and offering poems to readers as though they are food or benedictions, gossip or prescriptions. The first half of the book is international in scope, and Hirsch writes with particular ardor about Russian, Spanish-language, Muslim, and Jewish poets who shed light on some of worst of humankind's countless tragedies. the lambent essays in the book's second half form a new map of American poetry as Hirsch stakes out territory for underappreciated and emerging writers, reveling in works of humor as well as gravitas. Hirsch's aesthetic is unerring, and his interpretations are profound as he considers our "collective destiny" and takes measure of poetry's encompassing vision.
- Donna Seaman ______________________
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