Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
art car stories
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.
doors self ordinary-world
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.
moving self house
Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.
goes-on dishes patches
A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.
use
A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
shadow-work shadow way
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.
world might woods
An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.
dust glimpse treats
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.
running past choices
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.
pain birth geography
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.
existence amazement ifs
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
sorrow stones way
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
creativity two creative
The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
precise
The untranslatable thought must be the most precise.