“Poetry now, here, is not taken so seriously, or noticed so widely. But, however few who may now look to them, poems still can be felt as needed, felt as one way to give needed name to things that need naming.” NeedsWritingFeelingsPoetryUnderstandingPoemPoems Author:Jane Hirshfield
“Americans aren’t accustomed to reading poems as words written to slip past a censor; readers in other places and times have read poetry that way always.” WritingAmericaPoetryPoemActivismCensorshipAmericansCensors Author:Jane Hirshfield
“Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.” WritingMindPastSkinsMetaphorLogical Author:Jane Hirshfield
“I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.” PeopleWayWritingMadeLanguageSilenceTreeChildhoodSolitudeFruitWinterChinaWanderIntimateApplesParadoxJoyousMinnesotaApple TreesLithuania 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
“The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.” WayWritingMindWalksPerspectiveTypeExerciseSurfaceRationalTraveledDesperationStrategicSteepInvestigating Author:Jane Hirshfield
“I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I think that request made me more alert to mushrooms, and now they've cropped up in my work, the way mushrooms themselves do after rain, quite a lot. But I've only just now taken up mushroom hunting, after going to a class offered at my local library.” ThinkingWayWritingMadeClassTakenRainLibraryLocalsHuntingIntroductionRequestMushroomsAnthology Author:Jane Hirshfield
“I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.” WorldWritingHumansHeartDoeIdeasStoriesSpeakEmotionExistenceMysteryCrossesProfoundSentencesThreshold Author:Jane Hirshfield
“When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.” KnowsWritingMovingGoalMysteryConditionsConceptsUnknowing Author:Jane Hirshfield
