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

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
Tenderness
Awkward
Apples
Inside
Cezanne
Alertness
Awaken
Nourishment

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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
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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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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.
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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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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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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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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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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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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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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.
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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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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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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.
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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.
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