Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
magnification clarification
Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.
writing exercise perspective
The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
life-is-short long desire
Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
views tea mountain
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.
love two people
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.
dream doors dwelling
One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.
morning lasts firsts
Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first.
who-i-am tree looks
Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
eye tools world
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.
wall paradise doe
There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
discovery essentials needs
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.
echoes way one-way
One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.
art discovery ordinary
Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.
real passion thinking
Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.