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.
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.
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.
I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.Collection: Three
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Heart
How fragile we are, between the few good moments.Collection: Moments
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.Collection: Eye
Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.Collection: Laziness
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.Collection: Writing
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Cutting
Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.Collection: Book
Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.Collection: Ends
"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.Collection: Real
In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.Collection: Fearless
This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.Collection: Garden
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.Collection: Art
Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.Collection: Oil
In order to gain anything, you must first lose everythingCollection: Order
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.Collection: Moving
Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.Collection: Existence
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Creativity
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.Collection: Ink
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.Collection: Truth
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Writing
I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.Collection: Thinking
I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Dust
In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.Collection: Cat
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.Collection: Views
I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.Collection: Different
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.Collection: Running
How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.Collection: Promise
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Artist
Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.Collection: Love
The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.Collection: Apples