Jane Hirshfield Quotes - Page 4

Quotes about:

• Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Book, Doe, Awareness

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• 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.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Artist, Luxury, Important

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Morning, Lasts, Firsts

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• I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Different, Range, Middle

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• 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.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Dust, Glimpse, Given

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• In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Cat, Missing, Mercy

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• How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Death, Mesh, Fine

  Jane Hirshfield (2011). “Come, Thief: Poems”, p.49, Knopf

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• An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Might, Woods, Path

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Heart, Simple, Mind

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

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• Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Matter, Unexpected, Language

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

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• A poem can use anything to talk about anything.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Use

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Moving, Self, House

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• 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.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Pain, Birth, Geography

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• 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.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Dream, Night, House

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• 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.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Exercise, Perspective

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com.

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• I once was asked to contribute to a mushroom poem anthology. I didn't have anything, and so instead ended up writing the introduction. I think that request made me more alert to mushrooms, and now they've cropped up in my work, the way mushrooms themselves do after rain, quite a lot. But I've only just now taken up mushroom hunting, after going to a class offered at my local library.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Taken, Rain, Writing

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com.

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• 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.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Eye, Doctrine, Tools

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.57, Knopf

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• 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.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Looks, Littles, Intimacy

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• Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Artist, Color, Play

  Source: www.americanmicroreviews.com

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• The first poem in The Beauty holds a woman in Portugal in a wheelchair singing, with great power, a fado. I have never seen this or heard of it, the image simply arrived. But surely such a thing has happened. And it matters to me that it has, or could.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Singing, Matter, Firsts

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be "Yes." The next words: "And then."

  Jane Hirshfield

  Hands, Shapes, Might

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Grief, Joy, Poetry

  Jane Hirshfield (2015). “Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World”, p.178, Knopf

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• At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. What I've chosen, what's happened unchosen, can't be unmade or redone. Poetry, though, is a door that only continues to open. Even the unchangeable past changes inside a poem. Not the facts, but the feeling, the comprehension.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Past, Doors, Feelings

  FaceBook post by Jane Hirshfield from Mar 13, 2015

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• The same words come from each mouth differently.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Mouths

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• I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Horse, Hammers, Trainers

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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