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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.

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
Imagination
Peppers
Mind
Explode
Think
Metaphors
Thinking
Metaphor
Hot
Mouth
Senses
Mouths
Chili

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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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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How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
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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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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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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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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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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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Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.
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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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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
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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.
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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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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield