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

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
Earth
Swallows
Everything
Gardening
Always
Metaphor
Task
Tasks
Essentials
Using
Garden

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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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
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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.
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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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At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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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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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
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
Jane Hirshfield
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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