Home / Quotes / Quote by Jane Hirshfield

Quote by Jane Hirshfield

“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.”

Quote by Jane Hirshfield

Author

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield is an American poet known for her concise and profound poetry. Born on February 24, 1953, she has gained widespread recognition in the literary world since the 1980s. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

Thinking Want Writing House Language Building Comprehension Earthquakes Piers Osmosis Building Houses

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.”

Heart Art Feelings Turns Language Knowing Tongue Gestures Vocabulary Grammar Thoughts And Feelings Immersion Diction Art Making

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.”

Knows Want Needs Writing Hands Eye Names Ability Knowing Color Please Ears Physics Painter Landscape Gestures Rhetoric

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“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.”

Want Writing Reason Moving Certain My Own Boundaries Preserves Poetic Thirst Unknowing Perimeter

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.”

Art Stories Form Certain Sound Car Poet Patterns Works Of Art Chicago Ireland Detroit Brooks Magnet Philip Cupboards

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“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.”

World Self House Rooms Doors Figures Ordinary Window Gorgeous Palaces October Ordinary Life Archetype Vanishing Ordinary World

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.”

World Self States Moving House Fundamentals Metaphor Transition Multiplicity

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.”

Certain Goes On Amount Cooks Dishes Carpet Patches Housekeeping

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“A poem can use anything to talk about anything.”

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.”

Way Shadow Small Parts Shadow Work

Author:Jane Hirshfield