“A burst pipe can be fixed with practical knowledge, materials, working hands and working will. For other crises – the kind not amenable to immediate and practical solution, the kind before which a person may feel almost entirely powerless – what’s needed is something else, something that lives in art, story, music, myth, poems. Call it company; call it caliper; call it compass.” ArtPoetryMusicPoemMythPoemsStoryProblemsCrises Author:Jane Hirshfield
“Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.” ArtAgePoetryHistoryPaintingValuePersistenceConservation Book:Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry Source: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
“Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.” ArtRememberImpossibleOrdinaryArt IsDiscoveryReactionsSubstanceChemicalsMultipleUnforgettableNewnessChemical Reactions Author:Jane Hirshfield
“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.” WorldArtStillsSelfMomentsFormAbilityGriefKnowingPossibilityColorEvolutionShadowMeetingsSomedaySimplestLiberating Author:Jane Hirshfield
“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.” HeartArtFeelingsTurnsLanguageKnowingTongueGesturesVocabularyGrammarThoughts And FeelingsImmersionDictionArt Making Author:Jane Hirshfield
“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.” ArtStoriesFormCertainSoundCarPoetPatternsWorks Of ArtChicagoIrelandDetroitBrooksMagnetPhilipCupboards Author:Jane Hirshfield
