211 Quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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.

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.

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.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

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

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

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.

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.

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.