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Jane Hirshfield Biography

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield (born 24 February 1953) is an American poet, essayist, and translator.

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Jane Hirshfield Quotes

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.

Eye, Doctrine, Tools, Eyes, Study, Discovering

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.

Different, Draw, Legs, Pace, Speak, Walk

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.

Accept, Eye, Fate, Life, Long, Unsure

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.

Art, Grief, Knowing, Says, Simplest

Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar.

Familiar, Fear, Habit, Keep, Laziness

Time. . . brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.

Away, Brings, Everything, Taking, Time

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.

Apples, Autumn, Cider, Heat, Summer

Poems offer us counter-knowledges. They let us see what is invisible to ordinary looking, and to find in overlooked corners the opulence of our actual lives. Similarly, we usually spend our waking hours trying to be sure of things - of our decisions, our ideas, our choices. We so want to be right. But we walk by right foot and left foot.

Decision, Feet, Ideas, Invisible, Usually

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

Everything, Firsts, Gains, Lose, Order

Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings-his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.

Community, Singing, Literature, Fidelity, Writer

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

Doors, Light, Opens, Paper, Slip, Snow

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.

Bring, Eye, Names, Painter, Pleases, Writing

Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.

Argument, Doe, Enough, Make, Passion

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.

Life, Long, Silence, Steepens, Unplug, World

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.

Language, Matter, Part, Unexpected, Work

Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days.

Ears, Eye, Fierceness, Silent, Sleep, Wildly

The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.

Real, Mean, Compassion, Allow, Absurdity

Near even a candle, the visible heat. So it is with a person in love.

Candle, Heat, Love, Person, Persons

Some questions cannot be answered. They become familiar weights in the hand, round stones pulled from the pocket, unyielding and cool.

Hands, Pockets, Questions, Round, Weight, Weights

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.

Book, Calm, Calmly, House, Tree, Window

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