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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.
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
Part
Littles
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Intimacy
Little
Poem
Looks
Studio
Life
Studios
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Beyond
Freedom
More quotes by Jane Hirshfield
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.
Jane Hirshfield
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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
Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
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
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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
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
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
A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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 nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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
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