“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.” WantTryingPayAttentionTaughtPay Attention Author:Jane Hirshfield
“Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.” WantMindHeartAsksSimplePagesUnderstoodComplexesSurfaceComplexityHeart And MindUnspoken Author:Jane Hirshfield
“Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.” WantLongPlayWantedArtistSoundImaginationPleasureSeeingFieldsColorDisciplineLong TimePressesAvailableDeeperStrongestInvitesStrangenessPaletteHelium Author:Jane Hirshfield
“Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.” WantTryingIdeasChoicesLeftHoursDecisionWalksFeetOffersOrdinaryCornersInvisibleWakingOverlookedOur ChoicesOpulenceActual Life Author:Jane Hirshfield
“I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.” ThinkingWantWritingHouseLanguageBuildingComprehensionEarthquakesPiersOsmosisBuilding Houses Author:Jane Hirshfield
“The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.” KnowsWantNeedsWritingHandsEyeNamesAbilityKnowingColorPleaseEarsPhysicsPainterLandscapeGesturesRhetoric Author:Jane Hirshfield
“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.” WantWritingReasonMovingCertainMy OwnBoundariesPreservesPoeticThirstUnknowingPerimeter Author:Jane Hirshfield
