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From Grinnell to the Guggenheim

Much lauded poet Edward Hirsh '72 returns for reading and reminiscence

In 1968 the freshman roommate of Edward Hirsh '72, a fellow football player, asked for a new room after realizing Hirsch was not just a football player but a poet. Hirsch had the room, a double on Loose 2nd, to himself for the rest of the year.

It was not the last thing poetry would get Hirsch. He would win Grinnell's Selden Whitcomb poetry prize as a sophmore. And as a junior. And as a senior. He would win a Watson fellowship. He would publish one book after another. He would become a professional poet.

Monday night Ed Hirsch returned to the first place he ever heard a poetry reading - the humble Forum South Lounge - now the author of six books of poetry and three books of non-fiction (including the bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry), the winner of numbers awards and grants and thepresident of the Guggenheim Foundation. Hirsch is perhaps the most famous writer Grinnell has produced.

"It's moving to be back in the Forum for me," Hirsch said in an interview after the reading. "Because so much of what was formative to me in poetry happened here. Every poetry reading I ever heard for my life between 1968 and 1972 took place here. I didn't really hear other readings until after that." With the Joe Rosenfield Campus Center opening next year, however, Hirsch's reading on Monday night may be the last poetry reading in the Forum for a while.

While the structure of the campus has changed a lot since the early seventies, Hirsch says the campus feels very much the same.

"I've been back before," Hirsch said. "but every time I come I feel my younger self here and I feel what it meant for me to be here, and how dramatic it was for me to be here, and how intense. Everywhere you go, because the campus is so small, you have a sort of Proustian recall of what happened to you and how it felt."

What Hirsch found at Grinnell was his professional poetic path and a humane morality learned through the liberal arts. "The liberal arts education I got at Grinnell set me on a life path," Hirsch said. This education has never left him. "For me, [the Guggenheim presidency] is the maximum version of the liberal arts education. The Guggenheim feels like the fulfillment of that idea of supporting people in all different fields, in all different walks of life, in terms of their creative work." The Guggenheim Foundation provides grants to individuals in 78 fields, from sciences to the humanities to choreography. Hirsch is its fourth president in 80 years.

Hirsch's Grinnell education initiated him in the liberal arts, and he believes all Grinnellians to have a responsibility to the "humane values" we pick up here. "Those values are under threat in the culture," he said. "We have a task to keep something alive at a time when it's being threatened. I think that the commitment to open-mindedness, the commitment to creativity in so many different fields, the commitment to social consciousness is a way of thinking that Grinnell gives you that sets you on your path."

Grinnell not only gave Hirsch a sense of the values which would lead him through life, but gave him a confidence that his ideas and actions mattered. Hirsch thinks that this confidence allows Grinnellians to get out into the world and do things of significance. "Doing anything significant takes a kind of faith because long before you have any real evidence that you can do it, you have to have the faith to believe that you can do. And I think Grinnell instills that faith in you because what you do feels important ... We have a responsibility to what we have become or what we might become."

Hirsch maintains strong ties to Grinnellians, both to his former teachers and to Grinnell students, coming back to campus every few years to give readings.

After the reading, Hirsch spent over an hour signing books and chatting with his old teachers and students.He offered advice, listened to praise and signed books. And he spoke with some current Grinnellians, who will soon leave Grinnell to follow their own paths.

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