About Jane Hirshfield: Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator.
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
The heart's actions are neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.
Whales follow the whale-roads. Geese, roads of magnetized air. To go great distance, exactitudes matter. Yet how often the heart that set out for Peru arrives in China, Steering hard. consulting the charts the whole journey.
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.
One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature, accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers, oil the hooves well, caress the small ears with praise. Have the new halter of woven silver embedded with jewel...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider." [ ]
Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow 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, immens...
Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.
Standing Deer As the house of a person in age sometimes grows cluttered with what is too loved or too heavy to part with, the heart may grow cluttered. And still the house will be emptied, and still the heart. As the thoughts of a person in age somet...
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Past time, I threw the flowers out, washed out the cloudy vase. How easily the old clearness leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.
