I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve. Jane Hirshfield More Quotes by Jane Hirshfield More Quotes From 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. Jane Hirshfield eye writing hands A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand. Jane Hirshfield sorrow stones way 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. Jane Hirshfield always missing want art 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. Jane Hirshfield effort poetry path love 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. Jane Hirshfield i-am feel job experience 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. Jane Hirshfield you music self world 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 yourself you luck poetry 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. Jane Hirshfield story you solitude world
