One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem. Jane Hirshfield More Quotes by Jane Hirshfield More Quotes From Jane Hirshfield I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will. Jane Hirshfield osmosis writing thinking 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 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 shapes might hands If truth is the lure, humans are fishes. Jane Hirshfield fishes humans truth At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink. Jane Hirshfield ink moments life-is The untranslatable thought must be the most precise. Jane Hirshfield precise The same words come from each mouth differently. Jane Hirshfield mouths I will never become a horse trainer, a biologist, a person competent with a hammer. My loves were my loves. Jane Hirshfield trainers hammers horse Life is short. Jane Hirshfield life-is-short desire long The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness. Jane Hirshfield cold moon darkness Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being. Jane Hirshfield magnification clarification History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom. Jane Hirshfield truth stories people 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 poetry grief joy I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write. Jane Hirshfield want writing moving And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. Jane Hirshfield love two people Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance. Jane Hirshfield gestation ripening space 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 Jane Hirshfield light doors snow 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 luxury important artist There are openings in our lives Jane Hirshfield our-lives opening knows Every morning is new as the last one, uncreased as the not quite imaginable first. Jane Hirshfield lasts morning firsts
