Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
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.
community singing literature
Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.
writing winter apples
I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.
grief joy poetry
Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
moon darkness cold
The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
existence amazement ifs
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
simple water secret
A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.
opening knows our-lives
There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.