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    Heartland by Edward Hirsch - Poetry Foundation

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    The document discusses Edward Hirsch's view of poems as "messages in bottles" sent out to unknown recipients. It describes how poems feel like they are addressed directly to the reader, even from afar. The essay cites poets like Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam discussing how a poem's addressee may be someone it is traveling toward for a long time. For readers of poems, the text becomes their "secret address" through attentive reading.

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    Heartland by Edward Hirsch - Poetry Foundation

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    dorothymaealba
    48 views3 pages
    The document discusses Edward Hirsch's view of poems as "messages in bottles" sent out to unknown recipients. It describes how poems feel like they are addressed directly to the reader, even from afar. The essay cites poets like Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam discussing how a poem's addressee may be someone it is traveling toward for a long time. For readers of poems, the text becomes their "secret address" through attentive reading.

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    Heartland by Edward Hirsch _ Poetry Foundation

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    The document discusses Edward Hirsch's view of poems as "messages in bottles" sent out to unknown recipients. It describes how poems feel like they are addressed directly to the reader, even from afar. The essay cites poets like Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam discussing how a poem's addressee may be someone it is traveling toward for a long time. For readers of poems, the text becomes their "secret address" through attentive reading.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    48 views3 pages

    Heartland by Edward Hirsch - Poetry Foundation

    Uploaded by

    dorothymaealba
    The document discusses Edward Hirsch's view of poems as "messages in bottles" sent out to unknown recipients. It describes how poems feel like they are addressed directly to the reader, even from afar. The essay cites poets like Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam discussing how a poem's addressee may be someone it is traveling toward for a long time. For readers of poems, the text becomes their "secret address" through attentive reading.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as pdf or txt
    of 3

    5/26/2020 Heartland by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

    ARTICLE FOR STUDENTS

    Heartland
    Poems are like messages in a bottle sent out with little hope of finding a recipient. Those of us who find

    and read poems become their unknown addresses.

    BY E D WA R D H I R S C H

    Read these poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read
    them while you’re alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to
    you. Read them when you’re wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to
    yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture—the constant buzzing
    noise that surrounds us—has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great
    distance to find you. I think of Malebranche’s maxim, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer
    of the soul.” This maxim, beloved by Simone Weil and Paul Celan, quoted by Walter
    Benjamin in his magisterial essay on Franz Kafka, can stand as a writer’s credo. It also
    serves for readers. Paul Celan said:

    A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent
    out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on
    land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward
    something.

    Imagine you have gone down to the shore and there, amidst the other debris—the seaweed
    and rotten wood, the crushed cans and dead fish— you find an unlikely looking bottle
    from the past. You bring it home and discover a message inside. This letter, so strange and
    disturbing, seems to have been making its way toward someone for a long time, and now
    that someone turns out to be you. The great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, destroyed in
    a Stalinist camp, identified this experience. “Why shouldn’t the poet turn to his friends, to
    those who are naturally close to him?” he asked in “On the Addressee.” But of course those
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68412/heartland 1/3
    5/26/2020 Heartland by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

    friends aren’t necessarily the people around him in daily life. They may be the friends he
    only hopes exist, or will exist, the ones his words are seeking. Mandelstam wrote:

    At a critical moment, a seafarer tosses a sealed bottle into the ocean waves, containing his
    name and a message detailing his fate. Wandering along the dunes many years later, I
    happen upon it in the sand. I read the message, note the date, the last will and testament of
    one who has passed on. I have the right to do so. I have not opened someone else’s mail.
    The message in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, I have
    become its secret addressee.

    Thus it is for all of us who read poems, who become the secret addressees of literary texts. I
    am at home in the middle of the night and suddenly hear myself being called, as if by
    name. I go over and take down the book—the message in the bottle—because tonight I
    am its recipient, its posterity, its heartland.

    Return to the Guidebook


    Originally Published: January 23rd, 2006

    Poet and author Edward Hirsch has built a reputation as an attentive and elegant writer and reader of poetry. Over the
    course of many collections of poetry and criticism, and the long-running “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post,
    Hirsch has transformed the quotidian into poetry in his own work,...

    C O N TA C T U S

    N E WS L E T T E R S

    PRESS

    P R I VA C Y P O L I C Y

    POLICIES

    TERMS OF USE

    P O E T RY M O B I L E A P P

    61 West Superior Street,

    Chicago, IL 60654

    Hours:

    Monday-Friday 11am - 4pm

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68412/heartland 2/3
    5/26/2020 Heartland by Edward Hirsch | Poetry Foundation

    © 2020 Poetry Foundation

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68412/heartland 3/3

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