Quotes from Jane Hirshfield

However strong his opinions and theories, Bash?'s primary allegiance was to the living moment and its accurate, full-hearted presentation. Of the formal requirements of haiku, he said, "If you have three or four, even five or seven extra syllables but the poem still sounds good, don't worry about it. But if one syllable stops the tongue, look at it hard.

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means?

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.

I know I shouldn't be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I've thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I'm captivated by the mountain stream's interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life.

When the body dies, where will they go, those migrant birds and prayer calls, as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer? With voices of the ones I loved, great loves and small loves, train wheels, crickets, clock-ticks, thunder – where will they, when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind. This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.

The thought that something we cannot see, of unsurpassable skill and unimaginable form, exists in the back room's locked safe—isn't this, for any artist, for any person, an irresistible hope, beautiful and disturbing as the distant baying of Thoreau's lost hound that tells us, not least, that the mysteries of distance are endless?

The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.

I cast my hook, my vote against it, I decide to make peace. I declare this intention but nothing answers. And so I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof, then into an oven. I wait. Peace is patient and undemanding, it surpasseth.

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. from "For What Binds Us

It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self.

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely.

The heart's reasons seen clearly, even the hardest will carry its whip-marks and sadness and must be forgiven. As the drought-starved eland forgives the drought-starved lion who finally takes her, enters willingly then the life she cannot refuse, and is lion, is fed, and does not remember the other. So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it.

Autumn" Again the wind flakes gold-leaf from the trees and the painting darkens— as if a thousand penitents kissed an icon till it thinned back to bare wood, without diminishment. The Paris Review Issue 109, Winter 1988

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.

Little soul, you have wandered lost a long time.

One useful way to approach a haiku is to understand each of its parts as pointing toward both world and self. Read this way, haiku remind that a person should not become too fixed in a singular sense of what the self might consist of or know, or where it might reside.

What poems are doing is counterbalancing the mainstream tenor of our culture, which is to do, to be active, to be energetic and to prove one's self… and one of the messages underlying all poems that move us is that we have nothing at all to prove

Here is a soul, accepting nothing.

There is more and more I tell no one, strangers nor loves. This slips into the heart without hurry, as if it had never been. And yet, among the trees, something has changed. Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am. from "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight" The Atlantic Monthly (vol. 277, no. 6, June 2016)

To remind us of the existence of others when we have fallen into the maze of interior, subjective life is one large part of the work of literature's windows. They keep us from stifling solipsism, by returning the personal self to connection with what is beyond it.

over 19,000 haiku about Spam—"Spamku"—have to this date been posted online.