Jane Hirshfield Quotes & Sayings

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some — Jane Hirshfield

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything — Jane Hirshfield

Poems ... are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again, — Jane Hirshfield

The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved. — Jane Hirshfield

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime. — Jane Hirshfield

over 19,000 haiku about Spam - "Spamku" - have to this date been posted online. — Jane Hirshfield

How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own. — Jane Hirshfield

Perishable, It Said
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
And below, in different ink,
The date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking;
Now at the back of each hand,
Now inside the knees,
Now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
Then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
Hunger, sorrow, fears-
These too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.
How suddenly then
The strange happiness took me,
Like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
Inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings. — Jane Hirshfield

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough. — Jane Hirshfield

Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer - and non-disturbance. — Jane Hirshfield

At some point, I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it; that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens. — Jane Hirshfield

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving — Jane Hirshfield

Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love. — Jane Hirshfield

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Clear moon, a boy afraid of foxes walked home by his lover — Jane Hirshfield

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled. — Jane Hirshfield

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
[Autumn] — Jane Hirshfield

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

"And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff. — Jane Hirshfield

The Cloudy Vase
Past time, I threw the flowers out,
washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it. — Jane Hirshfield

In a room with many windows
some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Desire is the moment before the race is run. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition-as making a spark requires two things struck together. — Jane Hirshfield

Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins. — Jane Hirshfield

Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them. — Jane Hirshfield

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes. — Jane Hirshfield

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind. — Jane Hirshfield

There the beloved red sweater,
bright tangle of necklace, earrings of amber.
Each confirming: I chose these, I.
But habit is different: it chooses.
And we, it's good horse,
opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit. — Jane Hirshfield

Hope is the hardest love we carry. — Jane Hirshfield

Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another. — Jane Hirshfield

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you. — Jane Hirshfield

It's one of the saving graces in a life, to be able to perceive one's own and others' absurdity, to notice our shared human frailties and be able, at least some of the time, to smile rather than grimace. Like most people, I must have started out with a comic worldview in my cupboard. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

As some strings, untouched,
sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us. — Jane Hirshfield

The same words come from each mouth differently. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

To feel sabi is to feel keenly one's own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did "infinity in the palm of your hand" - to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast. — Jane Hirshfield

It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before ... Art lives in what it awakens in us ... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. 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. — Jane Hirshfield

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making. — Jane Hirshfield

So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. — Jane Hirshfield

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen. — Jane Hirshfield

I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains. — Jane Hirshfield

There is no paradise, no place of true completion
that does not include within its walls the unknown. — Jane Hirshfield

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 — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it. — Jane Hirshfield

One way poetry connects is across time ... Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem. — Jane Hirshfield

Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind. — Jane Hirshfield

Life is short.
But desire, desire is long. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further. — Jane Hirshfield

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." — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

How fragile we are, between the few good moments. — Jane Hirshfield

And that other self, who watches me from the distance of decades,
what will she say? Will she look at me with hatred or with compassion,
I whose choices made her what she will be? — Jane Hirshfield

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it. — Jane Hirshfield

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds. — Jane Hirshfield

The thought that something we cannot see, of unsurpassable skill and unimaginable form, exists in the back room's locked safe - isn't this, for any artist, for any person, an irresistible hope, beautiful and disturbing as the distant baying of Thoreau's lost hound that tells us, not least, that the mysteries of distance are endless? — Jane Hirshfield

Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous. — Jane Hirshfield

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand. — Jane Hirshfield

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight. — Jane Hirshfield

Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind. — Jane Hirshfield

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely. — Jane Hirshfield

Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room. — Jane Hirshfield

Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self. — Jane Hirshfield

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook. — Jane Hirshfield

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.
In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble. — Jane Hirshfield

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

I know I shouldn't be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I've thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I'm captivated by the mountain stream's interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life. — Jane Hirshfield

Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay. — Jane Hirshfield

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it. — Jane Hirshfield

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise. — Jane Hirshfield

How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield