In 2026, the Academy of American Poets invited twelve poets to each curate a month of poems. In this short Q&A, Edward Hirsch discusses his curatorial approach and his own creative work.

Poets.org: Welcome to the Guest Editor Q&A hosted by the Academy of American Poets. I’m Mary Sutton, editorial director of the Academy, and I’m here today with the Guest Editor for October, Edward Hirsch. Ed is a former Chancellor of the Academy and the author, most recently, of My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy. Ed, it’s an honor. Thank you for joining me today.

Edward Hirsch: My pleasure, Mary. Nice to be with you.

Poets.org: Let’s jump right in. How did you approach curating Poem-a-Day?

Hirsch: Tactically, with a lot of care and great excitement. I’m aware that Poem-a-Day gives a platform to each poet who’s featured, and I wanted to make the most of our opportunity. Poets are the vehicles for their poems. I chose poets I admire, some with long careers, some who haven’t published a book at all, and asked them to send me the best they’ve got. I let everyone know that I was looking for particular poems with emotional intensity, poems that take risks, poems that have high stakes, poems of passion and invention, and send me what you’ve got. Some people couldn’t come through, but others did. And those who did, in my opinion, really meet the moment.

Poets.org: Now, if you could direct our readers and listeners to one poem or more than one poem on Poets.org that you haven’t curated, what would it be and why?

Hirsch: I love a lot of the poems on Poets.org from the canon. I mean, I love Walt Whitman’s little poem, “A Clear Midnight,” and I love a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm.” But if I had to choose one poem of all, I’d choose a poem by the Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski called “Self-Portrait.” The reason for that is that Adam was one of my closest friends. I loved him dearly. I miss him. The poem “Self-Portrait” captures, from his perspective, what he was like. It’s got a lot of dry irony, a lot of passion, a lot of skepticism, and a kind of quiet ecstasy. The poem brings him back to me. He wrote it in the mid-nineties, and I happened to be around when he wrote it, so it’s especially meaningful to me.

Poets.org: Now, you’ve contributed a great deal to the Poets.org archive. The Academy was granted permission some time ago to reprint entries from your gargantuan book, A Poet’s Glossary, which was a follow-up to How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, published in 1999. Can you tell us more about why you took on such a massive undertaking and what it took to prepare for and organize this compendium of all poetry terms?

Hirsch: First of all, I love rolling them out, the terms on the Academy’s website. We were presenting them every week with a lot of terms, and they were rolling out, and I was hearing from people back about the terms. Some of them they knew, but they didn’t know how far they went back. Others, they didn’t know at all. That was sort of insider baseball that was really fun.

Ironically, I didn’t want to write a poet’s glossary for How to Read a Poem. I didn’t want a glossary at all. I tried to write that book for general readers, for both initiated and uninitiated readers. But my editor felt strongly that there were terms that still ... No matter how you tried to get away from specialized language, there were terms that would come up like iambic pentameter or metaphor that were basic and elusive, or forms that I had discussed, but I hadn’t really discussed the history of the form, like, say, the sonnet, that had just come up. And so I decided to just write a glossary in How to Read a Poem of all the terms that I had used in the book to be helpful to the readers who might’ve missed something.

I was aware in doing that that my take on the glossary was different than other glossaries because ... I mean, I’m a bit of a monster this way. I have my own theory on each of the forms, and so in defining the form, I also explained my theory on how it works and what worked best in it. And then it turned out that the glossary was one of the most useful parts of How to Read a Poem, especially for teachers. And that made me aware of all the things that I hadn’t put in it, because I’d only put in things that were in the book itself.

And so I began noodling around with some of the things that I knew about other forms and terms that I hadn’t put into the book, especially ... I read through the history of anthropology, how poetry works from different countries, and the anthropological terms. And I started putting them in, and I got overly stimulated and excited and began to create this gargantuan book. I became more and more wired up about it, and finally I just couldn’t stop, so I decided to go all in on oral forms and written forms. Really, How to Read a Poem is about lyric poetry, but the glossary also includes epics from around the world. I don’t know, I just got taken with the whole project.

Poets.org: How many years did it take to complete that project?

Hirsch: It scares me to think about, Mary. [laughs] It scares me to think about that. Probably about a decade. But I wasn’t working on it exclusively. I took my job as president of the Guggenheim Foundation in 2003, and that’s when I decided to write the glossary. Many of my friends thought that my idea of taking a full-time job as a side project would be a full glossary of all poetry terms. But it made me feel at home, and I could use my own library. I basically used it out of my poetry library and wrote it from there. Eventually, I finally began to narrow it down by focusing on one letter at a time.

Poets.org: That’s helpful, as an organizing principle [laughs].

Hirsch: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I don’t recommend the letter S or T. [laughs] There are just so many terms. [laughs]

Poets.org: Indeed.

Hirsch: There are so many terms with those letters.

Poets.org: And really important ones, yeah.

Hirsch: Turn to W and X. [laughs]

Poets.org: Speaking of your work as president of the Guggenheim, I’m not sure that many people know that you serve in that role. Of course, the Guggenheim Foundation is an organization that issues grants to many individuals working in the literary arts. You joked once to me that you got the job simply because you were the one who picked up the phone when they called [laughs], though I’m sure it’s more complicated than that [laughs].

But I’m curious, how does your work as an arts administrator nourish and inform your work as a writer and editor and vice versa?

Hirsch: It’s very hard to say, but I’d say the main thing is that the Guggenheim Foundation gives grants in fifty-two different fields. Not just the literary arts, but in the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and all the creative arts, photography, choreography, music composition. I guess what I’d say is I can’t separate what I learn from my job and giving grants in so many different fields from my life as a writer because I don’t really remember what I knew before.

But I think that for much of my life, I was maniacally focused exclusively on poetry and learning everything I could about poetry. And that’s been meaningful to me. But when I went to the Guggenheim Foundation from the creative ... First, I was teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Houston. But when I moved from teaching in Houston to running a foundation that covered the whole span of human knowledge, I couldn’t just focus on poetry. I had to focus on all these other fields as well, and that’s been a tremendous opening up of my own mind in terms of what I’ve learned. Now, how that affects my writing, I can’t exactly say, but I know a lot more than I used to know about a lot of different fields.

Poets.org: What are you reading right now?

Hirsch: Right now, I’m very focused ... I have to say, I think actually what I’m doing right now is rereading because I’m very focused on my current work. And so what I’m rereading is very specific, Book IX of The Odyssey, Book VI of The Aeneid, “The Inferno,” Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, and Rilke’s poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.” Because I’m reading about how these great visionary tacticians wrote about their journeys of their characters to the other world. To an underworld.

Poets.org: Very interesting. What are you working on now in your writing, teaching, and publishing life?

Hirsch: I don’t want to say too much about what I’m writing now because I’m still writing it, and I’m a bit superstitious, but I am deep into a book length poem called “Other World.” As many people know, I’m going blind, and in the poem, I come out of the subway station into the sunlight and it often happens to me, I white-out, that is I can’t see anything in the sun. In the poem, I start waving my cane around and moving into the city, and somehow I move through a seam or a doorway to another world.

When I enter this other world, people begin appearing to me from my past, and I begin to discover or wonder if I can find everyone from what people call the great majority or all my dead. My dead people start coming back to me, and I try to capture what they’re like, not in full-length elegies, but in moments of time, often of doing something with me. And so the poem becomes a kind of vision and a memoir of people who have meant a great deal to me who are not alive anymore, and I’m trying to bring them back and capture them in the fullness of their being at different moments in time.

So, that’s what I’m doing on writing. On teaching, I’ve got a gig coming up at Poets House this fall about ... It’s an intensive two-day workshop about ... Well, people will be writing prompts in response to the poems that I’m bringing in, which are some of the great Modernists from Europe and Latin America who meant the most to me. Or from Russia. An example would be [Vladimir] Mayakovsky’s poem “Talking to the Sun” and then Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to The Sun of Fire Island,” and we see how O’Hara responds to Mayakovsky. Or Cesar Vallejo’s great poem, “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone,” where he imagines his own death on a Thursday, and then a poem by Donald Justice called “Variations on a Text by Vallejo,” where he imagines his own death. And so we see how poets start responding to other poets, and then we just read some of the great poems and think about how we might respond to them.

And then I’m also teaching an online class for a Jewish organization called Yetzirah, a book club, and we’re taking eight of the poets from my book, The Heart of American Poetry, who are Jewish, and writing about what their contribution is to American poetry, starting with Emma Lazarus and probably ending with Adrienne Rich. And then, finally, the Library of America has asked me to teach an online course in the spring. I’ve divided it into four stages of a human life, so we’re taking American poems about childhood, American poems about adolescence, American poems about middle age and late middle age, and then American poems of old age.

And then in publishing, the thing I’m most excited about is I’m working on Philip ... I’m Philip Levine’s literary executor, and I’m working on editing his collected poems. Phil was born in 1928, and we’re going to publish it in 2028 and have a huge celebration of his great contribution to American poetry.

Poets.org: Well, Ed, we’re all very grateful for all of your contributions, not just to American poetry, but to world poetry. Thank you so much for joining me this afternoon.

Hirsch: Pleasure to be with you, Mary. Thank you so much.