everyone has a story that will break your heart

On the poem as a 'made thing' and a 'human document' And, and I think the culture as a whole wants to move on so quickly that it makes it difficult for individuals to grieve properly. I don't think that's a comfortable way for people. And so therefore people take these feelings and go underground with them because no one wants to hear about them. And I believe that this sort of optimism, which has helped so much as a country, also can elide over the deeper feelings that people have. I'm all for it, but I believe that before you can heal, you have to mourn.

And I believe that that's sort of rushed. So that as soon as something happens, terribly terrible, either individually or collectively to a family or to a group, everyone starts talking about healing right away. And it's not that Americans don't recognize that people have griefs, but it makes them very uncomfortable, and they want to get over it as fast as possible. I believe that we're immature about grief because we want to box it up into stages and get rid of it. On the idea that America is 'immature' about grief There's a lot of mental illness, and I believe that poetry can help us address these wounds and therefore help to heal us. And I think that there's going to come a reckoning. We haven't done much of that during this tremendous year of crisis. And I believe that poetry gives us a way to start thinking through our feelings and to articulate our feelings. There are different kinds of grief, but everyone has to grieve in his or her own way.

And that's going to take a very long time. One of the things that has gotten somewhat lost during the pandemic is all those people that were lost this year.Īll those people who died got caught up somehow in the news, but the griefs of the families and the grief of the people who were left behind and what they lost is not really been accounted for. I'm hoping we're sort of at the end point of something we're not entirely in the midst of it, but we're not completely out of it yet. On reading the poems in this collection now at this stage of the pandemic Highlights of the interview with Edward Hirsch

Everyone has a story that will break your heart