I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance,… — 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
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
Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known.… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence… — 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
