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

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

Jasmine

"Almost the twenty-first century" --
how quickly the thought will grow dated,
even quaint.

Our hopes, our future,
will pass like the hopes and futures of others.

And all our anxieties and terrors,
nights of sleeplessness,
griefs,
will appear then as they truly are --

Stumbling, delirious bees in the tea scent of jasmine. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths. — Jane Hirshfield

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve. — 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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

China
Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese,
roads of magnetized air.
To go great distance,
exactitudes matter.
Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,
Steering hard.
consulting the charts
the whole journey. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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. — 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

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

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

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. — 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 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. — 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 thought I would love you forever - and, a little, I may,
in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent,
or reach for a man: as one might stretch
for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top
of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this,
they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness,
sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since,
the answering yes. — Jane Hirshfield

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can. — Jane Hirshfield

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life. — Jane Hirshfield

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days. — 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 moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness. — 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

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

One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling. — 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

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world. — 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

Hope is the hardest love we carry. — Jane Hirshfield

There are worlds / in which nothing is adjective, everything noun. — Jane Hirshfield

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

A poem can use anything to talk about anything. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn. — Jane Hirshfield

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow. — Jane Hirshfield

The Promise"

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always. — 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

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

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

[A]rt can't ever be programmatic ... it needs on the contrary to be complicating, subtle, questioning, doubtful and doubting. — Tony Leuzzi

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland. — Jane Hirshfield

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

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. — 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

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do. — Jane Hirshfield

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar. — 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

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

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said. — 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

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

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

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us. — Jane Hirshfield

Zen pretty much comes down to three things
everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention. — Jane Hirshfield

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

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot. — 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

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. — Jane Hirshfield

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless. — 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

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

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

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

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