Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
“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 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
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
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
I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm. — 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
I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people,… — 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 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
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
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
“ 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
Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves… — 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
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
The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking,… — 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… — 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
“It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
“ Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature,… — 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
Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
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 Image
Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped—what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again, — 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
I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon"). — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar. — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
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 Image
