A Quote by Edward Hirsch
I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.
Related Quotes
The big difference between a warrior and a victim is that the victim represses and the warrior refrains. Victims repress because they are afraid to show the emotions, afraid to say what they want to say. To refrain is not the same thing as repression. To refrain is to hold the emotions and to express them in the right moment, not before, not later. That is why warriors are impeccable.
I always have the feeling that my subjects are the same - I'm just changing my point of view. I'm going to move a little bit this time and watch it a different way. But at the end, I think I'm always fascinated by the same things, except I will express them over and over again, with different words, with different colors, with different shapes. But strangely it will always be the same topics or subjects that are so important to me.
Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.
I'm sure that the meaning of the songs that I've written will change for me over the years, the same way that I can't even say what inspired some of the songs that I've been singing for a long time anymore.
A man ranks lowest on the credibility index; if he refrains to appreciate the creative instinct of his acquaintances jealously, but likes the similar nature works of others especially famous persons.
I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.
Generosity knows how to count, but refrains.
All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.
Back in the day, I came up with the expression "Same Animal - Different Cages" to describe our songs. I suppose over the years I've just broadened the meaning of that.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.
If a man can control his body and mind and thereby refrains from eating animal flesh and wearing animal products, I say he will really be liberated.
No matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would be generally the same.
I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.
The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.
A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.
Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
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