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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.

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
Firsts
Grows
Ness
First
Word
Saturated
Made
Free
Lighters
Every
Words
Lighter
Time
Next
Poems
Life
Hands
Poem
Become
Shape
Weightier
Might
Shapes
Heft

More quotes by 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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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
Jane Hirshfield
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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
Jane Hirshfield
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
Jane Hirshfield
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In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
Jane Hirshfield
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.
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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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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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.
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