Jane Hirshfield

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.

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

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.

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.

In the dream life, you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

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.