Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
love heat persons
Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.
heart hinges
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
flush music poem reason
One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.
gathering invite poetry release unknown
Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.
further leaning shared supposed
You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.
effort gestures learn looked love offer poems poetry specific toward understanding
I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside.
may stories begin-again
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
moments fragile good-moments
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
three attention pay
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
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.
passion doe argument
Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.