Ten Windows records the desire to understand others’ poems I’ve felt transfixed and transformed by: “What is a good poem doing?” “How is it done?” “Why does it work?” 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…
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…
—Jane Hirshfield, “Of Amplitude There is no Scraping Bottom,” Rebecca Olson for Tin House