Jane Hirshfield Quotes

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

You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other. ~ Jane Hirshfield

At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity. ~ Jane Hirshfield

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes. ~ Jane Hirshfield

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off --
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking. ~ Jane Hirshfield

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow. ~ Jane Hirshfield

"And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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. ~ Jane Hirshfield

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Autumn"

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens -
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

The Paris ReviewIssue 109, Winter 1988 ~ Jane Hirshfield

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can. ~ Jane Hirshfield

A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they sought. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Hyesims poems: transformative as walking high granite mountains by moonlight, with fragrant herbs underfoot and a thermos of clear tea in the backpack. Their bedrock is thusness, their images beauty is pellucid and new, their view without limit. The shelf of essential Zen poets for American readers grows larger with this immediately indispensable collection. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The heart's actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can't not. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration - expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering's only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: 'For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river - / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.'
"Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius 'not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.' Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist's concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance - a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue's draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some ~ Jane Hirshfield

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery. ~ Jane Hirshfield

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world. ~ Jane Hirshfield

A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand. ~ Jane Hirshfield

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Life is short.
But desire, desire is long. ~ Jane Hirshfield

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind.

This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind. ~ Jane Hirshfield

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn. ~ Jane Hirshfield

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing. ~ Jane Hirshfield

I see poetry as a path toward new understanding and transformation, and so I've looked at specific poems I love, and at poetry's gestures in the broadest sense, in an effort to feel and learn what they offer from the inside. ~ Jane Hirshfield

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness. ~ Jane Hirshfield

I cast my hook, my vote against it,
I decide to make peace.
I declare this intention but nothing answers.
And so I put peace in a warm place, towel-covered, to proof,
then into an oven. I wait.
Peace is patient and undemanding, it surpasseth. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The untranslatable thought must be the most precise. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

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

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 ... ~ Jane Hirshfield

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.
In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool. ~ Jane Hirshfield

What poems are doing is counterbalancing the mainstream tenor of our culture, which is to do, to be active, to be energetic and to prove one's self… and one of the messages underlying all poems that move us is that we have nothing at all to prove ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

There the beloved red sweater,
bright tangle of necklace, earrings of amber.
Each confirming: I chose these, I.
But habit is different: it chooses.
And we, it's good horse,
opening our mouths at even the sight of the bit. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Zen pretty much comes down to three things
everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention. ~ Jane Hirshfield

[A]rt can't ever be programmatic ... it needs on the contrary to be complicating, subtle, questioning, doubtful and doubting. ~ Tony Leuzzi

over 19,000 haiku about Spam - "Spamku" - have to this date been posted online. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Perishable, It Said
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
And below, in different ink,
The date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking;
Now at the back of each hand,
Now inside the knees,
Now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
Then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
Hunger, sorrow, fears-
These too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.
How suddenly then
The strange happiness took me,
Like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
Inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings. ~ Jane Hirshfield

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything ~ Jane Hirshfield

Here is a soul, accepting nothing. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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. ~ Jane Hirshfield

To feel sabi is to feel keenly one's own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did "infinity in the palm of your hand" - to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs - all this resinous, unretractable earth. ~ Jane Hirshfield

I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world. ~ Jane Hirshfield

What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Desire is the moment before the race is run. ~ Jane Hirshfield

When Your Life Looks Back,

When your life looks back--
As it will, at itself, at you--what will it say?

Inch of colored ribbon cut from the spool.
Flame curl, blue-consuming the log it flares from.
Bay leaf. Oak leaf. Cricket. One among many.

Your life will carry you as it did always,
With ten fingers and both palms,
With horizontal ribs and upright spine,
With its filling and emptying heart,
That wanted only your own heart, emptying, filled, in return.
You gave it. What else could do?

Immersed in air or in water.
Immersed in hunger or anger.
Curious even when bored.
Longing even when running away.

"What will happen next?"--
the question hinged in your knees, your ankles,
in the in-breaths even of weeping.
Strongest of magnets, the future impartial drew you in.
Whatever direction you turned toward was face to face.
No back of the world existed,
No unseen corner, no test. No other earth to prepare for.

This, your life had said, its only pronoun.
Here, your life had said, its only house.
Let, your life had said, its only order.

And did you have a choice in this? You did--

Sleeping and waking,
the horses around you, the mountains around you,
The buildings with their tall, hydraulic shafts.
Those of your own kind around you--

A few times, you stood on your head.
A few t ~ Jane Hirshfield

Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The Promise"

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Clear moon, a boy afraid of foxes walked home by his lover ~ Jane Hirshfield

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life. ~ Jane Hirshfield

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? ~ Jane Hirshfield

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar. ~ Jane Hirshfield

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

The Cloudy Vase
Past time, I threw the flowers out,
washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it. ~ Jane Hirshfield

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Think assailable thoughts, or be lonely. ~ Jane Hirshfield

There is no paradise, no place of true completion
that does not include within its walls the unknown. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March ~ Jane Hirshfield

The thought that something we cannot see, of unsurpassable skill and unimaginable form, exists in the back room's locked safe - isn't this, for any artist, for any person, an irresistible hope, beautiful and disturbing as the distant baying of Thoreau's lost hound that tells us, not least, that the mysteries of distance are endless? ~ Jane Hirshfield

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The work of existence devours its own unfolding.
What dissolves will dissolve--
you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer - and non-disturbance. ~ Jane Hirshfield

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

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
[Autumn] ~ Jane Hirshfield

Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland. ~ Jane Hirshfield

It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.

It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent - what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness -
between you, there is nothing to forgive -
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Hope is the hardest love we carry. ~ Jane Hirshfield

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further. ~ Jane Hirshfield

In a room with many windows
some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly. ~ Jane Hirshfield

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. ~ Jane Hirshfield