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
Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want… — 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
Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
“One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in… — 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
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
The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to… — 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
I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the… — 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
“ To Hear the Falling World Only if I move my arm a certain way, it comes back. Or the way the… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen,… — 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
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
