Jane Hirshfield quotes:

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.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

ChinaWhales followthe whale-roads.Geese, roads of magnetized air.To go great distance,exactitudes matter.Yet how oftenthe heartthat set out for Peruarrives in China,Steering hard.consulting the chartsthe whole journey."

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

TreeIt is foolishto let a young redwoodgrow next to a house.Even in this one lifetime,you will have to choose.That great calm being,this clutter of soup pots and books--Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.

The Cloudy VasePast time, I threw the flowers out,washed out the cloudy vase.How easily the old clearnessleapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.

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.

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 may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.

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.

The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider."[Autumn]

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard.

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.

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection.

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.

One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.

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.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.

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.

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life...

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be "Yes." The next words: "And then."

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension.

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.

There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous.

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.

Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first.

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.

A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

Life is short. But desire, desire is long.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

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.

Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

The same words come from each mouth differently.

At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.

Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.

Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

Justice lacking passion fails, betrays.

Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped"?what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again,

So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.

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.

Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

"And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another.

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.

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.

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.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

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.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.

Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtapositionÂ?as making a spark requires two things struck together.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.

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.