Jane Hirshfield

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

— Jane Hirshfield

“Plants, stones, utensils, each thing has its individual feelings, similar to those of men,” Bashō wrote.”

— Jane Hirshfield

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze,…

— Jane Hirshfield

You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing…

— Jane Hirshfield

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you…

— Jane Hirshfield

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with…

— Jane Hirshfield

In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you…

— Jane Hirshfield

“To feel sabi is to feel keenly one’s own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular…

— Jane Hirshfield

One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house…

— Jane Hirshfield

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A…

— Jane Hirshfield

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being…

— Jane Hirshfield

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music,…

— Jane Hirshfield

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you…

— Jane Hirshfield

“The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not…

— Jane Hirshfield

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance,…

— Jane Hirshfield

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or…

— Jane Hirshfield

I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the…

— Jane Hirshfield

“The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift…

— Jane Hirshfield

“One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read…

— Jane Hirshfield

“And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades, what will she say? Will she look at me with…

— Jane Hirshfield

The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have…

— Jane Hirshfield

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

“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

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

“The heart's actions are neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back…

— Jane Hirshfield

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw…

— Jane Hirshfield

“ China Whales follow the whale-roads. Geese, roads of magnetized air. To go great distance, exactitudes matter. Yet how often the heart…

— Jane Hirshfield

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules,…

— Jane Hirshfield

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