I set out to learn everything on my own so that I could become a poet. That was my goal. I didn’t know another way. For a long time—I’d say all of my twenties and much of my thirties—I was simply reading everything I could and trying to assimilate it. I visited a lot of countries, but I had no idea of the larger map. But then at some point—I had already been writing for years—things started to fall into place. I began to sense how things might fit together. I developed some theories. That’s when I decided it would be good to pay something back, to put my learning to good use. I was already a poet and critic, but I also started to reach out and become an advocate.

Poetry partly comes out of dark underground forces. Writing it is a bit like psychoanalysis. You’re supposed to go where it’s psychically troubling. It takes a certain kind of recklessness to face oneself. The more upsetting it is, the more you’re supposed to fly toward it, like a moth to the flame.

Visual art and artists are everywhere in your work. Where did the interest in ekphrasis begin?

INTERVIEWER

What happens between the books? What motivates the next project? A backlog? Anxiety?

HIRSCH

Initially, there’s a terrible blankness, a void. I feel my creativity is over and try not to despair. Slowly but surely, I come back to life—at least that’s how it’s happened in the past. I find something that moves or torments me, something that’s on my mind, something unexplored. My desperation gives way to curiosity and something begins to emerge. I feel I ought to do what I can.