“ The Cloudy Vase Past time, I threw the flowers out, washed out the cloudy vase. How easily the old clearness leapt,… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music,… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
“The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count,… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
“The first intimation of a new romance for a woman of the court was the arrival at her door of a messenger… — 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
