Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
life-is-short long desire
Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
reality tasks said
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
horse life-is this-life
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
long silence world
It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.
dream night house
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.
mouths
The same words come from each mouth differently.
ends
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.
cells years phones
I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").
order firsts gains
In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything
views tea mountain
Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection.
thinking imagination mind
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
artist luxury important
I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.
hands weight unyielding
Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.
promise tongue return
How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.