The American Poetry Review
Edward Hirsch

excerpt from One Life, One Writing!: The Middle Generation

What the wish wants to see, it sees.

And all is sweetness there
in the deep, enchanted silt.

My life's fever is soaking in night sweat--
one life, one writing!

Strangeness grew in the motionless air.

Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.

We are on each other's hands
who care.

It's probably futile to try to speak about them dispassionately, these initiating poems--these first presences--who lodged in me long before I ever understood what they asked of us, these core writers whose work launched so many of us into poetry, who delivered us to our own enchantments, our own imaginative lives. I stumbled across The Lost World at about the same time that I discovered Questions of Travel and For the Union Dead and Summer Knowledge. Soon I had also given myself over to the linguistic richness--the splendid oddities--of "The Lost Son" and "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet." I used to walk around reciting lines from these poems to myself, daydreaming them, so that they all started to fuse together in my mind. Somehow the farmer who stripped down to a blind wish in Randall Jarrell's "Field and Forest" merged with the man who decided to become a witch doctor--a sacaca--and goes down under the river in Elizabeth Bishop's "The Riverman." Somehow the watchful, waking, feverish writer in Robert Lowell's "Night Sweat" combined with the nameless speaker surveying the shadows in his room in the middle of the night, smoking at the window, in Delmore Schwartz's "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave." I still love the invocation to the animals, the primal creatures, at the beginning of Theodore Roethke's "The Lost Son." I'm moved by the Blakean suggestion that all that lives is holy. It's an invocation to the Muse, a cry for divine help, that takes us down to the earth. And I still link it to that affecting moment in John Berryman's "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" when the twentieth-century poet declares to the seventeenth-century one, "We are on each other's hands/who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us." Berryman's lines are a statement of lyric interdependency, a recognition that the dramatic poet does not have his meaning unto himself. His need calls out, and he turns for help to a poet from the past. All these poems are in some sense about the urgent necessity--and the cost--of vision. They get down into our bodies, our deep minds. They speak to--they are--enchantments that put off the practical world, that estrange us from the familiar and signal the presence of something in us that is deep and demonic, something wild and unruly, irrational, imaginative. We followed these voices into the silken river--the blind wish, the night mind--and ended up giving our lives to the visionary realms they inaugurated.


Edward Hirsch's recent books include On Love: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf) and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (Harcourt Brace).


home contents | previous | next