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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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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Way
Burlap
Sack
Sand
Stones
Sorrow
Full
Persons
Person

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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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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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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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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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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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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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Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.
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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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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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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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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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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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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.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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