Jane Hirshfield Quotes

Jane Hirshfield — American Poet born on February 24, 1953,

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator... (wikipedia)

I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.

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.

You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.

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

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.

Jane Hirshfield Quotes

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