Quote

A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

Jane Hirshfield

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Use
Anything
Poem
Talk

More quotes by Jane Hirshfield

Image
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
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.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
Jane Hirshfield
Image
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
Image
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
Jane Hirshfield