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.”

“Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.”

“Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.”

“as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.”

“I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.”

“In the dream life, you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.”

“Hope is the hardest love we carry.”

“It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self.”

“In a room with many windowssome thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.”

“One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.”

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

“Standing DeerAs the house of a personin age sometimes grows clutteredwith what istoo loved or too heavy to part with,the heart may grow cluttered.And still the house will be emptied,and still the heart.As the thoughts of a personin age sometimes grow sparer,like the great cleanness come into a room, the soul may grow sparer;one sparrow song carves it completely.And still the room is full,and still the heart.Empty and filled,like the curling half-light of morning,in which everything is still possible and so why not.Filled and empty,like the curling half-light of evening,in which everything now is finished and so why not.Beloved, what can be, what was,will be taken from us.I have disappointed.I am sorry. I knew no better.A root seeks water.Tenderness only breaks open the earth.This morning, out the window,the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.”

“Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.”

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

“At some point, I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it; that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.”

“You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.”

“My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.”

“What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless.”

“To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.”

“I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.”