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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Jane Hirshfield

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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Fragile
Moments
Good

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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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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.
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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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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.
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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.
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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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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.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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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.
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Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.
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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
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Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
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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