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.

Jane Hirshfield

Categorized in : Art Sound Car

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.

Jane Hirshfield

begin-again stories may

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.

Jane Hirshfield

three pay attention

"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.

Jane Hirshfield

perspective real path

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

Jane Hirshfield

good-moments fragile 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.

Jane Hirshfield

fate eye long

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.

Jane Hirshfield

vocabulary knowing art

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

Jane Hirshfield

amazement existence ifs

Something looks back from the trees,

Jane Hirshfield

who-i-am tree looks

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.

Jane Hirshfield

roots heart tree

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.

Jane Hirshfield

goal writing moving

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

Jane Hirshfield

heartless voice trying

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

Jane Hirshfield

familiar habit laziness

How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

Jane Hirshfield

hinges heart

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

Jane Hirshfield

fearless sorrow

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.

Jane Hirshfield

creativity creative thinking

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.

Jane Hirshfield

understanding self dream

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

Jane Hirshfield

argument passion doe

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.

Jane Hirshfield

vastness eye sleep

The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtapositionas making a spark requires two things struck together.

Jane Hirshfield

creativity creative two

Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving

Jane Hirshfield

words-and-music possibility perception