211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who’s seen a bit of the world can’t help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.

I don’t work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

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

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.

One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

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

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don’t leap into my mind when I’m distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind’s knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.