I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve. Jane Hirshfield More Quotes by Jane Hirshfield More Quotes From Jane Hirshfield Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first. Jane Hirshfield lasts morning firsts One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling. Jane Hirshfield dwelling dream doors There is no paradise, no place of true completion Jane Hirshfield paradise wall doe 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 doctrine eye tools 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. Jane Hirshfield choices feet ideas 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 unexpected language matter 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. Jane Hirshfield grief self art 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. Jane Hirshfield apples writing winter 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. Jane Hirshfield legs pace different A poem's essential discovery can happen at a single sitting. The cascade of discoveries in an essay, or even finding a question worth exploring in one, seems to need roughly the time it takes to plant and harvest a crop of bush beans. Jane Hirshfield essentials discovery needs 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 car sound 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. Jane Hirshfield ordinary-world self doors Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what's large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn't possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can't help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do. Jane Hirshfield ocean fall thinking Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels. Jane Hirshfield fields common looks as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us. Jane Hirshfield strings sound Justice lacking passion fails, betrays. Jane Hirshfield failing passion justice Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room. Jane Hirshfield grief self tree In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing. Jane Hirshfield cat mercy missing Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay. Jane Hirshfield cat doors long So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. Jane Hirshfield balance dark joy
