Top 131 Quotes & Sayings by Jane Hirshfield - Page 2

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Jane Hirshfield.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life. — © Jane Hirshfield
Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.
Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.
I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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.
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
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.
Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away. — © Jane Hirshfield
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.
The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.
Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first.
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.
I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").
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.
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.
The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.
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.
Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.
A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.
I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.
Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.
Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.
I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I think that request made me more alert to mushrooms, and now they've cropped up in my work, the way mushrooms themselves do after rain, quite a lot. But I've only just now taken up mushroom hunting, after going to a class offered at my local library.
The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.
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.
There is no paradise, no place of true completion 
 that does not include within its walls the unknown. — © Jane Hirshfield
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
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.
A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans.
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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.
Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.
Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.
So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. — © Jane Hirshfield
So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
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.
I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.
The same words come from each mouth differently.
The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be "Yes." The next words: "And then."
How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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.
Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.
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