When Edward Hirsch turns his attention from critiquing poetry to writing it, he says he invites the unconscious to inspire him.
Attendees crammed between rows in the JKB basement to claim a seat at the first presentation of the 2022 English Reading Series, held on Friday, September 16. At the front of the room sat Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow and celebrated poet who has built a reputation as both a writer and critic of poetry.
Born in Chicago in 1950, Hirsch studied at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a PhD in folklore. He has received numerous awards and fellowships across his ten published books of poems and six published books about poetry.
During his visit to BYU, Hirsch started his reading with the 78-page elegy for his son titled Gabriel: A Poem (2014), which expresses the complicated beauty and struggle of losing a child. “I did not know the work of mourning is like carrying a bag of cement up a mountain at night,” Hirsch read. “The mountaintop is not in sight because there is no mountaintop.”
Hirsch also presented other works including the poems, “Don’t Write Elegies,” “My Friends Don’t Get Buried,” and “I Walked Out of the Cemetery.” During the question and answer portion of the lecture, one of the students commented, “You seem to have a wonderful obsession with death.” Hirsch smiled and offered his perspective: his poems aren’t intended to be about death but rather the people he has lost and how he remembers them.
A different student referred to Hirsch’s unique background and disciplines, asking him how critiquing poetry has influenced the way he writes poetry. Hirsch explained that writing requires a different level of consciousness than analyzing. “No matter how much you learn about poetry, you still need this other element which is scary and uncontainable to enter into the poem.”
Hirsch referred to this other element as “the unconscious,” something traditionally known in Zen Buddhism as the “beginner’s mind.” When he enters a poem, Hirsch uses the unconscious element to clear all biases and expectations, allowing room for something new to kick in. Hirsch also said that allowing the unconscious to inspire your poetry will still certainly involve an amount of conscious work.
“If you don't stand in the rain, you're not going to get struck by lightning,” said Hirsch. “The unconscious never takes a vacation.”
Come experience the English Reading Series on Fridays at noon.