Jane Hirshfield Quotes

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Everything I do references something that influenced me.

My influences are all over the place. Different films have spoken to me at different times in my life, and they've helped create my idea of the kind of films I want to make.

My way to think about creation is like the end of the world. I love confusion. So music and image, picture, fabrics, people, person, talk: That's my way to work. And food. And perfumes. I love perfumes. And flowers and plants, and dresses and vintage.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

If the picture is not an artistic picture, it's show, like television. Television series are very funny, but it's a collective production. An industrial art. A car is not made by a person, it's made by a group of creators, only to go to the market to buy your cigarettes. That is a car - they are not a big art, they are a little art.

Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

For me my work is always being compared to my heritage. It has been quite a challenge unto itself just to drop into my voice and develop my individuated sound.

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

I was an English major in college, I went to a creative-writing program, and all my life, I really read and thought about fiction as a craft and an art form. I feel like I know a lot about it, and can trust my instincts.

Music, art, landscape - these are all things I draw inspiration from.

Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.

A great emotion is too selfish ; it takes into itself all the blood of the spirit, and the congestion leaves the hands too cold to write. Three sorts of emotion produce great poetry - strong but quick emotions, seized upon for art as soon as they have passed, but not before they have passed ; strong and deep emotions in their remembrance along time after ; and false emotions, that is to say, emotions felt in the intellect. Not insincerity, but a translated sincerity, is the basis of all art.

Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.

The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.

I'm kind of hooked to the game of art and literature; my heroes are artists and writers.

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.