When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness… — 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.… — Jane Hirshfield Copy Share Image
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 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… — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind. — 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
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
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
“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
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
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
