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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.

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
Arguments
Careful
Argument
Passion
Doe
Enough
Make
Declares

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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.
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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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Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
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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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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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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.
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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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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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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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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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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.
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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.
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Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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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.
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