Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
passion doe argument
Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
laziness habit familiar
Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.
morning lasts firsts
Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first.
ocean fall thinking
Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do.
wall paradise doe
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
echoes way one-way
One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.
who-i-am tree looks
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
different pace legs
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.
eye tools world
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.
dream doors dwelling
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.
love two people
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.
artist years umbria
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.
real passion thinking
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.
art discovery ordinary
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.