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
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
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
I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen. — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
