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Quote by Jane Hirshfield

“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.”

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

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“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.”

Thinking World Feels Kind Self Helping Fall Natural Walks Existence Steps Ocean Deceiving Natural World Numb Amnesia Immensity Self Centeredness Centeredness Summoning

Author:Jane Hirshfield

“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.”

Different Speak Walks Draws Legs Tongue Pace Essays

Author: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.”

Needs Seems Happens Essentials Findings Sitting Discovery Plant Exploring Harvest Essays Crops Beans Cascade

Author: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.”

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

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“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.”

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

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Author:Jane Hirshfield