Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous,… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
“All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence,… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share
