Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
long silence world
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.
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.
world might woods
An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.
self world growing
In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
bird world filled
Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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.
effort gestures learn looked love offer poems poetry specific toward understanding
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.
agree cut entire experience full human life realized spectrum
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.
art lives whatever
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.
gathering invite poetry release unknown
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.
experience human job press thoroughly
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.
flush music poem reason
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.
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
art grief self
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.