Judith Harris: I assume that in the years between high school, when you first started writing poetry, and the publication of your first book, when you were thirty-one, your work was changing as you developed your craft. What were the earliest poems that appear in For the Sleepwalkers, and at what point did you write them?
Edward Hirsch's first collection of poems, "For the Sleepwalkers," was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then, he has published
J.C. Hallman continues his series of Q&A’s with Story About the Story contributors today with Edward Hirsch. In addition to more than half a dozen books of poems, Edward Hirsch is the author of several books of “creative criticism,” including How to Read a Poem, which is excerpted in The Story About the Story I. Hirsch is president of the