Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy that The New Yorker called “a masterpiece of sorrow.” He has also written five prose books, among them A Poet’s Glossary (2014), a complete compendium of poetic terms, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller.
Radar:
In Alec Wilkinson’s piece in The New Yorker about you and the writing of Gabriel, you state:
“I used to believe in poetry in a way that I don’t now. I used to feel that poetry would save us. When I was writing ‘Gabriel,’ even the painful things were consoling, but I’m aware when I’m outside the poem that the poem doesn’t give me my son back. Art can’t give him back to me. It comforts you some, better than almost anything else can, but you’re still left with your losses.”
This admission seems to suggest that sorrow (of this magnitude) tests the limits of poetry and perhaps that poetry ultimately fails. Does this line of reasoning seem fair to you, or does part of you bristle at the notion of poetry failing the poet himself?
Hirsch:
I stand by my statement. I’ve devoted much of my life to poetry. It’s my vocation. I plan to continue with it for the rest of my life. I also consider it one of the human fundamentals, like music. But it has its limitations, as people do, and I’ve come up against them. It is a great art, not a salvation.
Radar:
It has been surmised by some critics that part of the reason you chose the tercet as your stanza form is that the tercet harkens back to Dante’s The Divine Comedy. I am willing to bet that Gabriel took its form for many reasons. Can you talk a bit about how you arrived at the tercets?
Hirsch:
Once I had committed to writing without any punctuation, to creating a long poem that could turn rapidly at any point, I felt I needed to organize the material—the grief, the stories—into some kind of regular units. I wanted a structure to keep me grounded. I hit upon ten units of three-line stanzas as a way to create near poems within the larger book-length poem. I wanted to sustain a lyric intensity while building a larger story.
The tercet has never been as widely employed as the couplet and the quatrain, but it seems distinctive because each stanza has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The number three has always had magical significance. I was thinking of Japanese haiku sequences, of Wallace Stevens’ plain style poems in three-lines, of William Carlos Williams’ triadic line, and especially of Dante’s terza rima, those interlocking stanzas he employs to call up the dead.
Radar:
Several poets and artists who have lost children and written about it are referenced in Gabriel (these include Tsvetaeva, Mallarmé, Mahler and Friedrich Rückert and others). How did you decide to include all these fellow artists/sufferers in your own narrative?
Hirsch:
While I was working on my poem, thinking about what to do, how to make it work, I started to consider how other poets had dealt with their grief, how they had responded to it in poetry. I felt as if I were calling upon the extended family. My story is very relentless, my grief is unrelieved, and I decided that over the course of a book the reader could use a little breathing space, a slightly different angle of attack. I also wanted to suggest that my sorrow is not unique, others have had similar sorrows, other personal disasters. This leitmotif throughout the book gave me a way to think about my own experience as a poet and father. There is an ongoing consideration of the dual demands of poetry and parenthood. These examples, poets as parents, gave me a way of meditating on the relationship. The poems about other poets were meant to reflect back upon the primary elegy.
Radar:
Did you try to include any elements that ultimately failed? Console us and tell us about the fits and starts of writing such a tremendous work.
Hirsch:
There were dozens and dozens of fits and starts. For one, I had many more poems about other poets who had lost children, so many that it started to take over the book. Some of them I simply couldn’t make work in such a tight format. Poems about Donne, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, Emerson, Melville. The poems about other poets were designed to add a secondary dimension to the book, they weren’t meant to carry the main story.
Along the way, I wrote many stanzas that didn’t have the same level of intensity, the same authority. I cut, I revised, I moved them around. I gave up my notion of 100 sections, which would have echoed the Commedia. The sequence needed to be swifter, shorter, more relentless. I had many additional near poems that didn’t work. I told too many anecdotes. For a while I was attached, for example, to a set about “dada boy,” to a sequence about the son as a flaneur. Ultimately, they just didn’t work. I tried to be ruthless. I wanted every line, every stanza, every section, to carry its weight.
Radar:
Do you think that you are finished writing about your son? Has the urge to continue writing about him or about grief as a topic of inquiry seized you since the completion of Gabriel?
Hirsch:
Well, we’ll have to see. Our subjects choose us, don’t they? I probably won’t write another book about Gabriel, but whatever I write will be in the wake of what I’ve experienced, lost, found. Right now I’m trying to write poems of spiritual inquiry. I’m theologically challenged. I don’t seem to be able to give up the idea of God, but I can’t believe in Him either.
Radar:
If you have returned to reading poetry, whose work are you reading now?
Hirsch:
I’m reading slowly through Mark Strand’s Collected Poems, where every poem is a gem, Eavan Boland’s A Woman Without a Country, especially the title sequence, and Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a haunting extraction from The Iliad. Apollinaire was my main model for writing without punctuation, and I like to return to him to lift my spirits. Zbigniew Herbert was also a model and his Collected Poems are by my bedside.