211 Quotes by 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 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.

The thought that something we cannot see, of unsurpassable skill and unimaginable form, exists in the back room’s locked safe – isn’t this, for any artist, for any person, an irresistible hope, beautiful and disturbing as the distant baying of Thoreau’s lost hound that tells us, not least, that the mysteries of distance are endless?

Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with – or at least want to try to stay with – whatever is going on.

Free verse follows ‘the breath of a thought where it leads’.

This garden is no metaphor – more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called ‘shadow work,’ not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems – perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

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 bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.