Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
eye fate giving
Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence.
perception possibility words-and-music
Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving
moving writing goal
When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.
silence expansion concentration
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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.