Of the forty poets included in Edward Hirsch’s “The Heart of American Poetry,” eight are Jewish. At least two others had Jewish ancestors. Let’s say that means that about twenty percent of the poets included in a book of American poets are Jewish—much higher than the 2.4 percent of the total population of Americans who are Jews!
What can we learn by considering the work of Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Anthony Hecht, Emma Lazarus, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, and C. K. Williams (as well as, perhaps, Denise Levertov and W. C. Williams) in the context of the other poets who are presented as poets at the heart of American poetry? How do Jewish poets fit into the context of American poetry? How is American poetry shaped by the work of American Jewish poets? These are some of the questions we will consider in this two-part meeting of Yetzirah’s book club as we learn from Edward Hirsch, author of “The Heart of American Poetry.”
Edward Hirsch, celebrated poet and inveterate advocate for poetry, was born in Chicago, educated at Grinnell College and then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a PhD in folklore. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His first collection of poems, “For the Sleepwalkers,” received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, “Wild Gratitude,” won the National Book Critics Award. Since then, Hirsch has published eight additional books of poems and five books of prose, including “A Poet’s Glossary,” the result of decades of passionate study, and “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry,” a national bestseller.
A longtime teacher at Wayne State University and in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.