Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 February 1953
CountryUnited States of America
different range middle
I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.
promise tongue return
How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
lying moving love-you
I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.
sleep eye ears
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.
book doe awareness
Time-awareness does indeed watermark my books and my life.
reality tasks said
Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
heart oil mind
The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
writing past mind
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
thinking perspective may
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.
ink life-is moments
At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
opening knows our-lives
There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.
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.