Poetry Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

“Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.”

— Jane Hirshfield

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

— Jane Hirshfield

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

— Jane Hirshfield

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

— Jane Hirshfield

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

— Jane Hirshfield

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

— Jane Hirshfield

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering…

— Jane Hirshfield

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

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

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

— Jane Hirshfield

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped—what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again,

— 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

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

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

— Jane Hirshfield

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

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

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the…

— Jane Hirshfield

“To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we…

— Jane Hirshfield

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the…

— Jane Hirshfield

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst.…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

“All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage…

— Jane Hirshfield

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous,…

— Jane Hirshfield

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

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known.…

— Jane Hirshfield

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves…

— Jane Hirshfield

“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

“ Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature,…

— Jane Hirshfield

“The first intimation of a new romance for a woman of the court was the arrival at her door of a messenger…

— Jane Hirshfield

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

— Jane Hirshfield

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

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own…

— 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

“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

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

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

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

— 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