Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
truth people stories
History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.
littles looks intimacy
A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.
trying attention want
Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.
writing past mind
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
needed
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
sleep eye ears
Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.
moving self house
Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.
precise
The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.
oil soul solitude
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
real enmity ancient
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
writing exercise perspective
The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
light doors snow
There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March
taken moments anything-can-happen
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
death fine mesh
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.