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