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History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.
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
History
Allowed
Speak
Complete
Stories
Rules
Truth
Filled
People
Fool
Folktales
Saying
Exempt
Society
Punished
Freedom
Mythology
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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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.
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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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.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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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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