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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.

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
Also
Poems
Matter
Unexpected
Work
Draw
Life
Draws
Awareness
Deep
Language

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
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Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
Jane Hirshfield
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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
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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
Jane Hirshfield
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield