Source: Poetry Everywhere
This video segment from Poetry Everywhere features the poet Edward Hirsch reading his poem "A Partial History of My Stupidity" at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Edward Hirsch is drawn to writing about wandering alone in the night, when a person’s thoughts can’t be hidden or drowned out by daily activities, work, or other people’s words. Facing up to what is really on your mind is the exhilarating and scary result of this night-time wandering.
For a biography of the poet Edward Hirsch please visit the Poetry Foundation Web site.
“A Partial History of My Stupidity” is set at night. The narrator has “rushed out into the evening”, as he does “most nights,” and soon finds himself wrestling with his own thoughts and desires, the things he can avoid thinking about during the busy day.
Wandering at night is a theme of Hirsch’s: he has said he likes “the feeling that other people were asleep and you were a solo consciousness… a single voice, or a single writer under a lamp when everything else was dark …[it] loosened the mind for reverie, for a certain kind of dreamscape.” In this poem, the speaker is concentrated on his solo consciousness, unaware of nature around him in the shape of birds and trees, aware only of the “tiger” within himself. As he walks alone, quiet and alone on the outside, inside he is taking stock of his “stupidity,” making an inventory of his feelings. A poem can be a way of exploring yourself, having an inner monologue.
He does not know what he really wants, or what he should want, or how to justify his own wants and needs in the face of other people’s demands or suffering. He “carries a cage around inside me.” He doesn’t give up on emotion, and caring about other people, but he also can’t lose his own self-consciousness: other people suffer and he does nothing.
Read a biography of the poet Edward Hirsch at the Poetry Foundation Web site.
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