Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
horse hammers trainers
I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.
dream night house
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.
horse phones air
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.
littles looks intimacy
A studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.
silence expansion concentration
Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
bird world filled
Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
horse life-is this-life
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
fearless sorrow
In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
broken fearless sorrow
Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
light doors snow
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
taken moments anything-can-happen
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
heart roots tree
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.
sound strings
as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
artist luxury important
I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.